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Abstract Italy will phase out electricity retail price regulation by July 1st, 2020. Until then, residential customers and small businesses who do not choose their supplier are served under a regulated tariff named “maggior tutela” (greater protection), supplied by the local distributor at a price set by the regulator. We review the literature on electricity retail competition – with particular regard to its expected effects on prices, innovation, and customer engagement – and the conditions under which competition is expected to deliver benefits. We perform a Structure-Conduct-Performance analysis of Italy's retail electricity market for residential customers, finding two issues potentially problematic: excessive market concentration and low customer engagement. We propose a phase-out mechanism that relies on graduality, asymmetric regulation, and a mandatory, opt-out collective switching exercise. The mechanism aims to rapidly reduce market concentration by leveraging behavioral incentives to customers to switch to the cheapest supplier.

AbstractWe analyze whether lower rents for energy-inefficient apartments reflect tenants’ willingness to pay due to a higher green awareness, purchasing power, or energy consumption costs. Based on a German rental apartment dataset from Q1 2007 to Q1 2019, we use interaction terms for socioeconomic characteristics in a hedonic regression model. We find that rents are lower for apartments with higher energy consumption, even in neighborhoods with lower levels of green awareness. This relationship is stronger in neighborhoods with higher purchasing power, such that communities with low levels of green awareness and high purchasing power show the steepest negative slope for increasing energy consumption (−8.6% from the highest to lowest rating). Thus, the rent-decreasing effect of purchasing power is higher than that of green awareness. Splitting the entire period into smaller windows, we find that the interaction effect of green awareness has emerged in the most recent years (2017–2019). This may be driven by changes in regulation, which have made it easier for tenants to assess the energy consumption before they rent, or by a general increase in green awareness over this period.

This paper analyzes the determinants of alternative automobile fuel regulation and development support with a particular focus on methanol fuel. We find that embedded interests, bureaucratic reforms, and political circumstances in the Chinese national, provincial, and municipal governments have all shaped policy outcomes in this area. The paper seeks to explain why at, the national level, support for alternative fuels has waned and finds that the concerns of state oil majors and disorganization during the process of national bureaucratic restructuring have been the deciding factors. Interestingly, at the sub-national level promotion of methanol continues unabated in some places. At the local level, business relationships as well as the embedded economic and personal interests of local leaders help to explain managerial local government behavior and sheds light on why government officials actively create and manage methanol fuel business opportunities through local standardization, subsidies, and hands-on management of SOE opposition. The switch towards methanol fuel was more successful in localities where individuals, either government officials or enterprise managers, formed an alliance and made this their ‘pet projects’. The analysis draws on 55 interviews conducted between June and October 2010 in Shanxi, a major coal-producing province which has supported methanol fuel-switching programs for over ten years. The findings contribute to debates about the condition of the local state in China. The argument put forward in this paper is that because of limited state capacity at the central level and insufficient concerns for the development of alternative fuels in the short-term, some sub-national governments with strong embedded interests promote certain alternative fuels by taking on active managerial roles, adopting creative and ad-hoc strategies to fill in the national level policy gap at the local level.

More than40%of US grain is used for energy due to the Renewable Fuel Mandate (RFS). There are no studies of the global distributional consequences of this purely domestic policy. Using micro‐level survey data, we trace the effect of the RFS on world food prices and their impact on household level consumption and wage incomes in India. We first develop a partial equilibrium model to estimate the effect of the RFS on the price of selected food commodities—rice, wheat, corn, sugar, and meat and dairy, which together provide almost70%of Indian food calories. Our model predicts that world prices for these commodities rise by 8–16%due to the RFS. We estimate the price pass‐through to domestic Indian prices and the effect of the price shock on household welfare through consumption and wage incomes. Poor rural households suffer significant welfare losses due to higher prices of consumption goods, which are regressive. However, they benefit from a rise in wage incomes, mainly because most of them are employed in agriculture. Urban households also bear the higher cost of food, but do not see a concomitant rise in wages because only a small fraction of them work in food‐related industries. Welfare losses are greater among urban households. However, more poor people in India live in villages, so rural poverty impacts are larger in magnitude. We estimate that the mandate leads to about 25 million new poor: 21 million in rural and 4 million in the urban population.

This paper examines the causal relationship between real GDP and energy consumption for 23 OECD countries from 1971 to 2009. Using recently developed panel econometric techniques the present paper takes into account structural breaks and cross-section dependence when analyzing the energy consumption-growth nexus. The empirical results of this study indicate that there exists a long-run equilibrium relationship between real GDP and energy consumption, and the impact of real GDP on energy consumption is larger than vice versa. Furthermore, the empirical evidence of a dynamic panel error-correction model reveals a bidirectional causal relationship between economic growth and energy consumption in both the short and long run.

The relationship between industrial structure (IS) and eco-efficiency (EE) is intricate with mutual influence and constraint. Exploring the coordinated relationship between IS and EE is beneficial to the sustainable development of ecologically fragile areas. This paper estimates and analyses the levels of EE and IS in 39 prefecture-level cities of the Loess Plateau, discussing the comprehensive and coordinated development levels between industrial structure rationalization (ISR) and EE, industrial structure advancement (ISA) and EE based on the coupling coordination degree model (CCDM). The results showed that the comprehensive development of the Loess Plateau has rough and imbalanced issues. The EE and IS are developing at a relatively low level, and the spatial distribution shows the development trend of high in the east and down in the west. The CCD of ISA and EE performs better than that of ISR and EE, but neither has reached the collaborative coupling state. The poor CCD score in the Loess Plateau is primarily attributable to its relatively backward degree of integrated EE and IS. The results are expected to provide decision-making support for EE improvement and industrial restructuring in the Loess Plateau and other ecologically fragile areas.

The search for economically efficient policy instruments designed to promote the diffusion of renewable energy technologies in liberalized markets has led to the introduction of quota-based tradable 'green' certificate (TGC) schemes for renewable electricity. However, there is a debate about the pros and cons of TGC, a quantity control policy, compared to guaranteed feed-in tariffs, a price control policy. In this paper we contrast these two alternatives in terms of social welfare, taking into account that electricity markets are not perfectly competitive, and show that the price control policy dominates the quantity control policy in terms of social welfare.