Household electricity demand, worldwide: climbing the 'ladder of needs'

摘要

This paper presents a new approach for modelling residential electricity consumption. Accounting for the derived nature of electricity demand, it is expressed as an S-shaped function of per capita income that reflects the diffusion in society of an unobserved stock of electricity-consuming goods-which enable users to meet a hierarchy of needs-as wealth increases. The specification isjustified on simple and quite general assumptions regarding income distribution and consumers' spending behaviours. Empirically, the model is applied to a panel of 91 countries over various time periods and a business-as-usual projection up to 2030 is performed. Further, the approach might be of interest for analysing households' budget shares, and it could be expanded by crossing macro and micro data to estimate dynamic Engel curves if applied to micro data on consumers' expenditures by income group.