long term competition in a dynamic game the cold fish war this article presents a model of credible voluntary collective agreements in a dynamic game these agreements are implicit in collections of history dependent threat strategies i consider the strategies in a game of resource exploitation credibility is represented by perfect equilibrium voluntarism requires at least that all behavior be supported by the threat of collapse of the agreement which would return the players to the memoryless equilibrium collective rationality requires that the agreement be robust to the possibility of mutually beneficial renegotiation i analyze the set of agreements meeting each of these restrictions

cooperative management of groundwater resources in the presence of environmental externalities this paper investigates how cooperation among users can achieve a better management of groundwater in the presence of environmental externalities cooperation allows users to internalize the damages caused by their activities and reduce extractions the paper develops a game theoretical framework to assess the value of cooperation in an aquifer that is divided into three sub aquifers that are being overly exploited two types of externalities are modeled first water extractions in each sub aquifer impact water levels in neighboring sub aquifers extraction externality second the three sub aquifers are also connected to an ecosystem and thus decisions in each sub aquifer affect the health of the ecosystem environmental externality a cooperative game theory model is applied the model empirically shows how the uncontrolled extractions in each sub aquifer affects neighboring groundwater users but also cause severe impacts to the linked ecosystem the model is tested empirically in one of the most important aquifers in spain the eastern la mancha aquifer the results illustrate how both extraction and environmental externalities interact in affecting the likelihood of cooperation among the users the paper estimates the value of cooperation and its stability with and without the environmental externality

extremism campaigning and ambiguity this paper studies a model of how political parties use resources for campaigning to inform voters each party has a predetermined ideology drawn from some distribution parties choose a platform and campaign to inform voters about the platform we find that the farther away parties are from each other on average the less resources are spent on campaigning on average thus if parties are extreme less information is supplied than if parties are moderate we also show that if a public subsidy is introduced we have policy convergence given some mild technical restrictions on the public subsidy

oil vulnerability index of oil importing countries abstract this paper assesses the relative oil vulnerability of 26 net oil importing countries for the year 2004 on the basis of various indicators the ratio of value of oil imports to gross domestic product gdp oil consumption per unit of gdp gdp per capita and oil share in total energy supply ratio of domestic reserves to oil consumption exposure to geopolitical oil market concentration risks as measured by net oil import dependence diversification of supply sources political risk in oil supplying countries and market liquidity the approach using the principal component technique has been adopted to combine these individual indicators into a composite index of oil vulnerability such an index captures the relative sensitivity of various economies towards developments of the international oil market with a higher index indicating higher vulnerability the results show that there are considerable differences in the values of individual indicators of oil vulnerability and overall oil vulnerability index among the countries both inter and intraregional

endogenous credible commitment and party competition over redistribution under alternative electoral institutions political parties competing in elections for the power to set public policy face the problem of making credible their policy promises to voters i argue that this commitment problem crucially shapes party competition over redistribution the model i develop shows that under majoritarian electoral rules parties efforts to achieve endogenous commitment to policies preferred by the middle class lead to different behavior and outcomes than suggested by existing theories which either assume commitment or rule out endogenous commitment thus left parties can have incentives to respond to rising income inequality by moving to the right in majoritarian systems but not under proportional representation the model also generates new insights about the anti left electoral bias often attributed to majoritarian electoral rules and the strategic use of parliamentary candidates as a commitment device i find evidence for key implications of this logic using panel data on party positions in 16 parliamentary democracies

informative cheap talk in elections why do office motivated politicians sometimes espouse views that are non congruent with their electorate s can non congruent statements convey any information about what a politician will do if elected and if so why would voters elect a politician who makes such statements furthermore can electoral campaigns also directly affect an elected official s behaviour we develop a model of credible cheap talk costless and non binding communication in elections the foundation is an endogenous voter preference for a politician who is known to be non congruent over one whose congruence is sufficiently uncertain this preference arises because uncertainty about an elected official s policy preferences generates policymaking distortions due to reputation career concerns we show that cheap talk can alter the electorate s beliefs about a politician s policy preferences and thereby affect the elected official s behaviour informative cheap talk can increase or decrease voter welfare with a greater scope for welfare benefits when reputation concerns are more important

cooperative and non cooperative harvesting in a stochastic sequential fishery abstract we examine cooperative harvesting in a sequential fishery with stochastic shocks in recruitment two fleets harvest in a stochastic interception fishery we analyze cooperative management as a non cooperative game where deviations from cooperative harvesting are deterred by the threat of harvesting at non cooperative levels for a fixed number of periods whenever the initial stock falls below a trigger level we illustrate the sequential harvesting game with an application to the northern baltic salmon fishery cooperative harvesting yields participants substantial gains in terms of expected payoffs the greatest gains accrue to the fleet harvesting the spawning stock the actions of which are not observed by the competitor an explanation for the prevalence of fish wars is provided even if a cooperative agreement is reached shocks in recruitment trigger phases of non cooperative harvesting further the cooperative solution can only be maintained when stock uncertainty is not too prevalent

assessing the energy vulnerability case of industrialised countries the emergence of new big consumer countries on the energy markets and the perspective of oil and gas depletion at the end of the current century raise the concerns about fair distribution of the remaining resources for the common and sustainable wellbeing of the mankind high volatility of energy prices discourages the investment and delays the energy technology transition voluntary measures are needed mainly in industrialised countries in order to develop alternative and sustainable energy sources to enable technology transfer towards emerging and developing countries and to avoid struggle for energy procurement in this paper a composite index of energy demand supply weaknesses is defined as a proxy of energy vulnerability the proposed index is based on several indicators such as energy intensity oil and gas import dependency co2 content of primary energy supply electricity supply weaknesses and non diversity in transport fuels the assessment of this composite index for selected industrialised countries is discussed as well as the sensitivity to various factors

a dynamic approach to voluntary environmental contributions in tourism abstract in an evolutionary game theoretical model of tourism firms that use an endogenous natural common pool resource cpr we show that stable equilibria with voluntary environmental initiatives may coexist with other equilibria where voluntary abatement is absent the basins of attraction of the equilibria are identified and a bifurcation analysis is carried out producing two results with policy implications first there is a highly non linear relationship between the cost of abatement required to be green and the share of green firms second increases in the number of the cpr s users will ultimately dissipate the incentives to make abatement beyond regulation

ena based evaluation of energy supply security comparison between the chinese crude oil and natural gas supply systems abstract energy has become a scarce global strategic resource and energy supply security is receiving increasing attention a common evaluation platform is necessary to systematically understand the supply security levels of different energy sources and help make the national energy strategy ecological network analysis ena is thus regarded as a useful common tool to systematically simulate evaluate and compare the supply security for different energy sources when considering the fact that modern energy systems have formed a complex global energy network through extensive energy trading based on the established ena platform we evaluated and compared china s crude oil and natural gas supply security from 2000 to 2012 to this end we assessed the overall security level investigated the relationship among different compartments within the network system determined the system s structure and analyzed the system s properties it was found that the chinese crude oil supply security level was higher than that of the natural gas supply and that the crude oil supply system was more mature in terms of multiple properties suggestions are proposed to improve the chinese energy supply security based on further scenario analysis including increasing domestic energy production controlling energy consumption diversifying foreign supply sources and strengthening the strategic reserve the ena based common platform can be used for the systematic evaluation and improvement of energy supply security and further support national energy policymaking for both developed and developing countries both energy importers and exporters

collusion discounting and dynamic games abstract this paper investigates the following claims in a dynamic game i pareto optimal outcomes are sustainable only by patient players and ii the set of equilibrium outcomes expands in the discount factor the intuition for these results although immediate for purely repeated games is shown to be incomplete for dynamic games consequently there is no direct link between patience and the sustainability of pareto optimal outcomes in fact there are dynamic games arbitrarily close to a repeated game in which such collusion is facilitated by impatience however for a class of dynamic games any equilibrium outcome that is sustainable by less patient players is also an equilibrium outcome when players are more patient journal of economic literature classification numbers c73 d90

the hidden cost of raising voters expectations reference dependence and politicians credibility abstract two politicians compete to get elected each politician is characterized by a valence which is unobservable to the electorate and can take one of two values high or low the representative voter prefers politicians with high valence but random shocks may lead him to appoint a low valence politician politicians make statements concerning their valence if the voter is a standard expected utility maximizer politicians statements lack any credibility and no information transmission takes place by introducing reference dependence and loss aversion we show that truthful communication is possible in equilibrium and we characterize the conditions under which it can arise intuitively these behavioral biases introduce a cost of overstating one s valence as overstatements may shift the electorate s preferences toward better skilled opponents

behavioral and institutional determinants of political business cycles the link between business cycles and the democratic politicalsystem has long been recognized by economists however thedeterminants of political business cycles are not well understood we discuss several institutional and behavioral determinants ofthose cycles such as revolving door appointments term limits andpreferences of the incumbent politician electorate and businesscommunity concerning the intertemporal pattern of publicexpenditure we show how they affect the cycle s amplitude in thecontext of a rational expectations model

indicators of energy security in industrialised countries energy security has become a popular catch phrase both in the scientific arena as well as in the political discussion yet in general the applied concepts of energy security are rather vague this paper sheds some light on concepts and indicators of energy security first we conceptually discuss the issue of energy supply security and explain why it is not to handle by one science alone and what economics may contribute in order to structure the topic after providing a brief survey of existing attempts to define or measure energy security we suggest an additional dimension along which indicators of energy security may be classified ex post and ex ante indicators finally we illustrate our concept on the basis of several simplified indicators while ex post indicators are mostly based on price developments ex ante indicators are to a greater extent aimed at illustrating potential problems our illustration suggests that it is worthwhile to take into account the market structure along with the political stability of exporting countries

energy security externalities and policies abstract in this paper we review conceptual arguments and empirical evidence related to two potential sources of market failure involving energy security in doing so we consider several questions involving the distinction between externality and market inefficiency and the distinction between market failures that are amenable or not amenable to correction given our current understanding of the workings of an economy several conclusions follow from our analysis regarding the potential sources of market failure and possible remedies the problem of excess wealth transfer from exporter market power may be an issue but current knowledge of oil market behaviour is too weak to support a strong conclusion other supposed costs of oil import dependence also are not well grounded including externalities related to the vulnerability of the economy to energy price shocks

fishery management under multiple uncertainty abstract among others who point to environmental variability and managerial uncertainty as causes of fishery collapse roughgarden and smith proc natl acad sci 93 1996 5078 argue that three sources of uncertainty are important for fisheries management variability in fish dynamics inaccurate stock size estimates and inaccurate implementation of harvest quotas we develop a bioeconomic model with these three sources of uncertainty and solve for optimal escapement based on measurements of fish stock in a discrete time model among other results we find 1 when uncertainties are high we generally reject the constant escapement rule advocated in much of the existing literature 2 inaccurate stock estimation affects policy in a fundamentally different way than the other sources of uncertainty and 3 the optimal policy leads to significantly higher commercial profits and lower extinction risk than the optimal constant escapement policy by 42 and 56 respectively

fishing as a supergame abstract this paper considers how cooperative solutions to games of sharing fish resources can be supported by threat strategies with highly mobile fish stocks the number of agents compatible with a cooperative self enforcing solution is not very high for reasonable values of the discount rate but sensitive to changes in the discount rate and costs and to cost heterogeneity with migrating stocks where growth and reproduction depend on how much all agents leave behind after harvesting the likelihood of a cooperative self enforcing equilibrium is increased with a dominant player and a competitive fringe the rents and optimum stock level of the dominant player fall quickly as the share of the competitive fringe increases

addressing global environmental externalities transaction costs considerations is there a way to understand why some global environmental externalities are addressed effectively whereas others are not the transaction costs of defining the property rights to mitigation benefits and costs is a useful framework for such analysis this approach views international cooperation as a contractual process among country leaders to assign those property rights leaders cooperate when it serves domestic interests to do so the demand for property rights comes from those who value and stand to gain from multilateral action property rights are supplied by international agreements that specify resource access and use assign costs and benefits including outlining the size and duration of compensating transfer payments and determining who will pay and who will receive them four factors raise the transaction costs of assigning property rights i scientific uncertainty regarding mitigation benefits and costs ii varying preferences and perceptions across heterogeneous populations iii asymmetric information and iv the extent of compliance and new entry these factors are used to examine the role of transaction costs in the establishment and allocation of property rights to provide globally valued national parks implement the convention on the international trade in endangered species of wild fauna and flora execute the montreal protocol to manage emissions that damage the stratospheric ozone layer set limits on harvest of highly migratory ocean fish stocks and control greenhouse gas emissions jel d23 p14 q22 q51 q54 q58

elections with privately informed parties and voters this paper studies a situation in which parties are betterinformed than voters about the optimal policies for voters weshow that voters are able to infer the parties information byobserving their electoral positions even if parties have policypreferences which differ substantially from the median voter s unlike previous work that reach opposite conclusions we assumethat voters have some private information of their own if theinformation available to voters is biased parties attempts toinfluence voters beliefs will result in less than fullconvergence even if parties know with certainty the optimalpolicy for the median voter

a political theory of populism when voters fear that politicians may have a right wing bias or that they may be in uenced or corrupted by the rich elite signals of true left wing conviction are valuable as a consequence even a moderate politician seeking reelection chooses populist policies i e policies to the left of the median voter as a way of signaling that he is not from the right truly right wing politicians respond by choosing more moderate or even left of center policies this populist bias of policy is greater when the value of remaining in o ce is higher for the politician when there is greater polarization between the policy preferences of the median voter and right wing politicians when politicians are indeed more likely to have a hidden right wing agenda when there is an intermediate amount of noise in the information that voters receive when politicians are more forward looking and when there is greater uncertainty about the type of the incumbent we show that similar results apply when some politicians can be corrupted or in uenced through other non electoral means by the rich elite we also show that soft term limits may exacerbate rather than reduce the populist bias of policies

cooperation on climate change mitigation abstract we analyze conditions under which it is possible to achieve efficient mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions with a self enforcing international agreement in which all countries find it in their self interest to abide by the agreement we model the choice of emissions by countries as a dynamic game we use a two part punishment scheme for deviations from an agreement that is renegotiation proof and show when this scheme supports the efficient outcome as a subgame perfect equilibrium using numerical examples we show that an efficient subgame perfect equilibrium exists for a range of reasonable parameter values the existence of such equilibrium may be non monotonic in the discount rate and the ratio of slope of marginal abatement cost and marginal damages

how does a natural gas supply interruption affect the eu gas security a monte carlo simulation abstract nowadays the european natural gas production has declined having as a consequence increased import dependence which is estimated to reach 85 by 2030 therefore the implementation of a european energy policy towards the viability competitiveness and security of energy supply is more than essential necessary parameter for the elaboration of such a policy is the diversification of natural gas supply sources and corridors in order to eliminate growing dependences moreover the recent cases of natural gas supply interruptions to the eu due to international geopolitical conflicts further underline the above indicating the necessity towards an assessment of the potential impact that a natural gas supply disruption would cause to the european natural gas security to this end and given the political uprising in the area of north africa main objective of this paper is to investigate how a natural gas supply interruption from algeria the eu s third largest supplier would affect the european natural gas security in terms of natural gas demand satisfaction monte carlo simulation was applied producing results on the more affected countries and underlining the importance of supplies diversification reserves and production when applicable towards the enhancement of natural gas security

communication in bargaining over decision rights abstract this paper develops a model of bargaining over decision rights between an uninformed principal and an informed but self interested agent we introduce two different bargaining mechanisms tacit and explicit bargaining in tacit bargaining an uninformed principal makes a take it or leave it price offer to the agent who then decides whether to accept or reject the offer in the equilibrium of the game the principal inefficiently screens out some agent types so that the agent s private information cannot be fully utilized when the decision is made in explicit bargaining in which parties can communicate explicitly via cheap talk before tacit bargaining however an equilibrium with no such inefficient screening exists even when the conflict of interest is arbitrarily large we also follow a mechanism design approach showing that under certain conditions explicit bargaining is an optimal bargaining mechanism that maximizes the joint surplus of the parties

the impact of reelection pressures on the fulfillment of campaign promises abstract it is part of the political science folklore that candidates are inclined to keep their campaign promises out of fear of not being reelected this paper develops a multiperiod signaling model for the purpose of exploring the validity of this folklore necessary and sufficient conditions are derived for a candidate to reveal his true policy intentions during the campaign a crucial condition for campaign speeches to be informative is that voters policy preferences respond to the incumbent s performance the refining of perfect bayesian equilibria in the multiperiod signaling context is also explored journal of economic literature classification numbers d72 c73

optimal cartel equilibria with imperfect monitoring abstract there exist optimal symmetric equilibria in the green porter model 4 8 having an elementary intertemporal structure such an equilibrium is described entirely by two subsets of price space and two quantities the only production levels used by firms in any contingency the central technique employed in the analysis is the reduction of the repeated game to a family of static games

read my lips but only if i was elected experimental evidence on the effects of electoral competition on promises shirking and trust abstract we experimentally test whether electoral competition reduces shirking behavior by office holders and increases citizens trust using a novel multi person investment game with voting we indeed find that elected office holders shirk less i e they back transfer more to citizens relative to investments than randomly appointed office holders surprisingly this effect is not driven by electoral competition inflating office holders promises instead elected office holders feel more committed to their promises than their randomly appointed counterparts elections initially also increase citizens trust because voters select candidates with the right kind of promises neither low nor non credibly high however over the course of the entire experiment we find no evidence that electoral competition increases citizens trust

regulation of fisheries bycatch with common pool output quotas abstract many fisheries around the world are plagued with the problem of bycatch the inadvertent harvesting and discard of non targeted species bycatch occurs when targeted and non targeted species coincide in the same habitat and gear is imperfectly selective one of the prevailing methods of controlling bycatch is the common pool quota system under this system biologists set total allowable catches tacs for both the targeted and non targeted species and the fishing season is closed when one of these tacs binds we develop a predictive model of a renewable resource that is regulated with this kind of common pool quota system the model demonstrates that the equilibrium will generally be characterized by excessive discards shortened seasons and foregone target species harvest these results occur even with very efficient low bycatch fishing gear we examine the sensitivity of our predictions to changes in technological parameters and degrees of spatial correlation of target and non target species finally we derive the optimal bycatch penalty function and describe its significance in light of various policy options available to regulators

to invest or screen efficiently a potential conflict in relationships governed by incomplete contracts abstract we consider a dynamic trade relationship where quality is not contractible and potential sellers retain quality relevant private information we show that the presence of an investment technology to improve the incumbent seller s innate quality may impair the efficiency of the screening process if the conflict is effective the buyer has to induce an inefficient screening process or reduce the productivity of the investment technology this conflict suggests that the hold up problem may be more severe than predicted by models of incomplete contracts that assume complete information

a free lunch in the commons we derive conditions under which raising costs through a regulatory constraint or a fully expropriated tax can increase the profits arising from a common pool resource the basic model assumes a fixed number of identical agents with linear costs selling in a single period at an exogenous price a necessary and sufficient condition for a cost increase to be profitable is that aggregate output from the resource be locally convex in aggregate effort we also show that cost increases can be profitable even if price is endogenous agents are heterogeneous entry is costless or agents are playing a markov perfect equilibrium of a dynamic game we also discuss more general welfare implications of the result along with its relation to existing results for a cournot oligopoly

decentralized management of common property resources experiments with a centuries old institution for centuries villages in the alps employed a special system for managing their common properties individual users could inspect other users at their own cost and impose a predetermined sanction a fine when a free rider was discovered the fine was paid to the user who found a violator experiments with the institutions demonstrate that this mechanism considerably improves efficiency of resource use the classical model of identical selfish agents does not capture the data as well as a model with heterogeneous and linear other regarding preferences altruism and especially potentially dysfunctional behavior such as spite and mistake play important positive roles

cooperation in the commons with unobservable actions we model a dynamic common property resource game with unobservable actions and non linear stock dependent costs we propose a strategy profile that generates a worst perfect equilibrium in the punishment phase thereby supporting cooperation under the widest set of conditions we show under what set of parameter values for the discount rate resource growth rate harvest price and the number of resource users this strategy supports cooperation in the commons as a subgame perfect equilibrium the strategy profile that we propose which involves harsh punishment after a defection followed by forgiveness is consistent with human behavior observed in experiments and common property resource case studies

mitigating the tragedy of the commons through cooperation an experimental evaluation abstract in a commons each firm s costs rise with industry output this externality can be mitigated if firms jointly restrict harvests but higher prices result repeated interaction usually facilitates cooperation that lowers harvest rates increased cooperation suggests there should be more firms in the socially optimal market structure using experimental markets with two to five firms we observe the influence of industry size on harvest rates cooperation increases the socially optimal number of firms in markets when there are static externalities but not for dynamic externalities finally even when the initial stock is low there is little tendency toward resource extinction

show them your teeth first a game theoretic analysis of lobbying and presure this paper investigates the choice of an interestgroup between lobbying words and pressure actions in order to influence a policymaker both lobbying and pressure are modeled asstrategic means of transmitting information that isrelevant to the policymaker however only pressure isdirectly costly to the policymaker the interactionbetween the interest group and the policymaker isframed as a repeated signaling game in equilibriumpressure in contrast to lobbying only occurswhen the interest group s reputation is sufficientlylow and always improves its reputation it is shownthat repeated lobbying cannot completely substitutefor pressure and that the interest group may beforced to sustain its reputation through lobbying weconclude that pressure is typically used to build upa reputation lobbying to maintain a reputation

the optimal number of firms in the commons a dynamic approach we consider a common property resource sold in imperfectly competitive markets there is a dynamic externality current harvests lower future stocks raising future harvest costs and a static crowding externality increasing industry size raises costs but lowers prices thus it has ambiguous welfare effects the optimal industry size typically changes over time so that a first best outcome cannot be obtained with a fixed number of firms single firm exploitation is optimal only under special circumstances the socially optimal open loop steady state industry size corresponds to the static optimum both generally differ from the closed loop steady state optimum

conceptualizing energy security abstract energy security 1 is one of the main targets of energy policy however the term has not been clearly defined which makes it hard to measure and difficult to balance against other policy objectives we review the multitude of definitions of energy security they can be characterized according to the sources of risk the scope of the impacts and the severity filters in the form of the speed size sustention spread singularity and sureness of impacts using a stylized case study for three european countries we illustrate how the selection of conceptual boundaries along these dimensions determines the outcome this can be avoided by more clearly separating between security of supply and other policy objectives this leads us to the definition of energy security as the continuity of energy supplies relative to demand

evidence on electoral accountability in the u s senate are unfaithful agents really punished many have questioned whether voters are able to hold incumbent officials electorally accountable through a retrospective voting strategy we examine u s senate elections from 1962 to 1990 in forty one states explaining which incumbents ran for reelection and their success in seeking reelection we find that an incumbent s deviation from her state party platform decreases the probability that she will run for reelection and win if she runs furthermore the electoral mechanism is found to be more efficient when voters are better informed finally we find that our divergent party platform model provides a better fit than the median voter model

assessment of energy security in china based on ecological network analysis a perspective from the security of crude oil supply abstract energy security usually considers both the stability of energy supply and security of energy use and it is receiving increasing attention globally considering the strategic importance and sensitivity to international change of the crude oil supply we decided to examine china s energy security an original network model was established based on ecological network analysis to holistically evaluate the security of the crude oil supply in china using this model we found that the security of the crude oil supply in china generally increased from 2001 to 2010 the contribution of different compartments in the network to the overall energy security resembled a pyramid structure with supply sources at the bottom the consumption sector at the top and the refining and transfer sectors in the middle north and south america made the largest contribution to the security of the crude oil supply in china we provide suggestions to improve the security of the crude oil supply in china based on our results and further scenario analysis the original network model provides a new perspective for energy security assessment which can be used as a baseline to develop other models and policy

stability and success of regional fisheries management organizations according to international law straddling fish stocks should be managed cooperatively through regional fisheries management organizations rfmos this paper analyzes the stability and success of these organizations through a game in partition function form based on the classical gordon schaefer bioeconomic model results show that the larger the number of fishing states that compete for the fish stock the higher are the relative gains from full cooperation but the lower is the likelihood of large rfmos being stable it is also shown that new entrants increase the incentives of rfmo members to leave and decrease the incentives of non members to join it moreover the success of coalition formation is positively correlated with the degree of cost asymmetry among fishing states and negatively with the overall level of efficiency

assessing the sustainability challenges for electricity industries in asean newly industrialising countries abstract rapid social and economic progress in fast developing countries such that among the countries in the association of southeast asian nations asean have driven substantial growth in electricity consumption in this region whilst this represents significant societal and economic development it has potentially growing adverse environmental impacts this raises a concern on sustainable development in the electricity sector in this region this study evaluates key sustainability challenges in the electricity industries in the five largest energy consumers in asean indonesia thailand malaysia the philippines and vietnam the 3a s energy sustainability objectives accessibility availability and acceptability are used as the sustainability analytical framework this study also draws together a set of associated indicators and criteria within the analytical framework to analyse the status of the electricity industries in these countries the analysis shows that key sustainability challenges in the asean 5 are attributable to satisfying rapid demand growth enhancing security of electricity supply and mitigating the increase in co2 emissions from electricity generation given the promising resource and technical potential in this region renewable energy emerges as a favourable option to address these challenges however increasing the share of renewable energy in electricity generation requires considerable policy support this study suggests that there is an opportunity for the asean countries to strengthen regional collaborations through experience and resource sharing to enhance sustainability in the electricity industries this study also highlights some of the key issues facing the electricity industry and the need for new generation investment decision support tools which can address these issues