Water, Electricity and the Poor: Who Benefits from Utility Subsidies?
Water, Electricity and the Poor: Who Benefits from Utility Subsidies?
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DOI：
10.2139/ssrn.3355440
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发表时间：
2005-03
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Kristin Komives;Foster Vivien;J. Halpern;Q. Wodon
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Kristin Komives;Foster Vivien;J. Halpern;Q. Wodon
公用事业服务补贴广泛存在于供水、卫生和电力领域。动机之一是通过便利穷人获得和使用此类服务以及重新分配资源以增强他们的购买力来改善穷人的社会福利。与此同时，此类补贴往往被视为导致资源利用效率低下和公用事业财政薄弱，从而阻碍了扩大和改善服务的努力。这些不利后果经常被用来反对向消费者收取低于服务成本的费用。补贴对这两方面的影响一直是备受争议的话题。随着各国政府寻求确保所有公民都能随时获得最低水平的此类服务，同时努力收回更大份额的公用事业运营成本，以产生维持服务和提高其质量所需的资源，这场辩论重新焕发活力。这本书对我们对这场辩论的一个关键方面的思考做出了实质性贡献：消费者补贴对城市供水和电力服务的分配影响。它汇集了多个国家的实证研究，记录了发展中国家消费者补贴的普遍性和变体，并提出了一些有助于评估此类补贴对穷人的惠益程度的指标。研究结果被置于更广泛的社会保护框架中，使用通用指标与其他部门的以贫困为重点的计划进行比较。这本书的发现发人深省。报告的结论是，与大多数其他转移机制相比，最常见的补贴工具（以数量为目标的补贴，例如通过提高集体关税提供的补贴）表现不佳。替代性消费和连接补贴机制显示出更大的前景，特别是与补充性非价格方法相结合，使贫困家庭能够获得和负担得起公用事业服务。在整个过程中，作者剖析了导致这些结果的许多因素，确定了政策制定者可以控制和用来提高绩效的因素。
Subsidies for utility services are widespread in the water supply, sanitation, and electricity sectors. One motivation is to improve social welfare of the poor by facilitating their access to and use of such services, as well as by redistributing resources to augment their purchasing power. At the same time, such subsidies have often been seen as engendering resource use inefficiencies and financially weak utilities, which hobble efforts to expand and improve service. Those adverse consequences have often been used to argue against charging consumers less than the cost of service. The impact of subsidies on both counts has been the subject of much controversy. The debate has gained renewed vigor as governments seek to ensure that all citizens have ready access to minimal levels of such services while striving to recover a larger share of the costs of utility operations to generate the resources required to sustain service and to improve its quality. This book makes a substantive contribution to our thinking on a key facet of the debate: the distributional impact of consumer subsidies for urban water supply and electricity services. Drawing together empirical research across a wide range of countries, it documents the prevalence and variants of consumer subsidies found in the developing world and presents a number of indicators that are useful in assessing the degree to which such subsidies benefit the poor. The findings are placed in a broader social protection framework where comparisons are drawn with poverty focused programs in other sectors using a common metric. The book’s findings are sobering. It concludes that the most common subsidy instruments (quantity-targeted subsidies such as those delivered through increasing block tariffs) perform poorly in comparison with most other transfer mechanisms. Alternative consumption and connection subsidy mechanisms show more promise, especially when combined with complementary nonprice approaches to making utility services accessible and affordable to poor households. Throughout, the authors dissect the many factors contributing to those outcomes, identifying those that policy makers can control and use to improve performance.