اثرات ناهمگن مقررات در بهره وری صنعت برق در سراسر کشورهای اتحادیه اروپا

This paper focuses on the relationship between the stringency of regulation (OECD indicators) and total factor productivity (TFP) growth in the electricity sectors of 19 European Union countries for the period 1994–2007. Both the OECD regulatory indicator and the TFP growth index have been decomposed in order to bring to light a complex picture of interrelations in which the negative impact of the overall regulation on productivity is the result of opposite forces. Estimation results tell us that only the stringency of entry regulation significantly reduces technological change, whereas vertical integration exhibits a negative and significant impact only on the catching up process (pure efficiency change). Lastly, we found an interesting result concerning the explanatory variables of the scale efficiency change: in this case only public ownership matters, in other terms high levels of public in the structure ownership of electric companies guarantee improvements in reaching the optimal scale of production. These heterogeneous effects are also confirmed when we use a different measure of efficiency, that is, the distance of the actual from the optimal reserve margin.

Restructuring, liberalising and privatising the electricity sector in developed and developing countries have resulted from a common view of economic policy that has dominated over the last two decades. In the European Union (EU), the experience of the United Kingdom as a trailblazer of liberalisation in the industry stimulated the adoption of three electricity directives (European Commission: 1996/92; 2003/54 and 2009/72) that gradually addressed different aspects of liberalisation but maintained the same long-term overriding goal of transforming individual state-owned monopolies into a single competitive EU electricity market (Haas et al., 2006, Jamasb and Pollitt, 2005, Joskow, 2008 and Littlechild, 2006). Pollitt (2009) recently acknowledged this effort as a formidable pro-competitive reform programme, although he also noted that the provisions did not explicitly address the issue of privatisation, as very few countries thus far have fully private electric companies (only the United Kingdom and Germany through 2007). Indeed, European Union reforms emphasise unbundling networks from generation and retailing, reducing collusion among large companies, eliminating entry barriers, guaranteeing an independent regulatory authority and ensuring the adequacy of supply. Consequently, many studies have focused on post-reform performance of electricity sectors around the world and within the European Union. Most of these studies have concerned the price and welfare effects of liberalisation, focusing on one or a handful of countries. Often, the reason for limiting analysis to just a few countries was to avoid the distortions that arise in large cross-country price-effect assessments. For example, some authors perceptively observed that the lack of information regarding different fuel cost regimes could lead to meaningless cross-country comparisons of electricity prices before and after the reforms (Harvey et al., 2006 and Joskow, 2006b). The few remaining studies contain large cross-country comparisons based on physical measures of efficiency, with the European Union countries included as a small group along with other developed, emerging and less developed countries. It thus appears that updated cross-country comparisons are lacking, especially studies that address the effects of reforms on the technical efficiency of the generation sector in the European Union.

In this study, we investigated the relationship between the stringency of regulation and total factor productivity growth of the electricity sectors in 19 European Union countries. We also tested the influence of regulation and its sub-indicators (entry barriers, vertical integration and public ownership) on a different measure of efficiency, one that relates more to effectiveness in delivering public services and the security of supply, specifically, the distance of the actual from the optimal reserve margin. The main purpose of the study was to disclose latent tensions among the different dimensions of overall regulation, differences that arise from their differential effects on the efficiency of electricity generation. We can trace this tension back to the more general and controversial relationship between liberalisation and privatisation processes, as the entry barriers and vertical integration clearly proxy for liberalisation, while public ownership relates to privatisation. Therefore, we first hypothesised that these heterogeneous effects result in a feeble overall effect of regulation on efficiency.