Jelena Zorić

Efficiency and regulation of the Slovenian electricity distribution companies

Energy demand, and in particular electricity demand in India has been growing at a very rapid rate over the last decade. Given, current trends in population growth, industrialisation, urbanisation, modernisation and income growth, electricity consumption is expected to increase substantially in the coming decades as well. Tariff reforms could play a potentially important role as a demand side management tool in India. However, the effects of any price revisions on consumption will depend on the price elasticity of demand for electricity. In the past, electricity demand studies for India published in international journals have been based on aggregate macro data at the country or sub-national/ state level. In this paper, price and income elasticities of electricity demand in the residential sector of all urban areas of India are estimated for the first time using disaggregate level survey data for over thirty thousand households. Three electricity demand functions have been estimated using monthly data for the following seasons: winter, monsoon and summer. The results show electricity demand is income and price inelastic in all three seasons, and that household, demographic and geographical variables are important in determining electricity demand, something that is not possible to determine using aggregate macro models alone.

Bank efficiency differences in the new EU member states

Abstract This article examines bank cost efficiency for five new EU Member States from Central and Eastern Europe and the three Baltic States for the period 1996 – 2006. The banking sectors in the selected set of countries had undergone a remarkable transformation before they achieved EU membership in 2004. We study cost efficiency differences between countries as well as efficiency improvements fostered by intense legislative and regulatory changes and extensive structural and institutional reforms carried out simultaneously. By employing the SFA approach an improvement in cost efficiency was discovered in the period investigated. Some noticeable differences in average cost efficiency among banking sectors can be detected as well. Empirical results also reveal certain significant associations of cost efficiency with country level macroeconomic characteristics, structure of the banking industry, and individual bank features. Analysis of correlating factors shows that the level of competition in the banking sector plays a more important role for cost efficiency improvements than the ownership structure itself. These results might be of interest to policy makers and regulatory authorities as they may provide help in detecting policy measures to create a business environment which would further enhance the cost efficiency of CEE banks.

Accounting for heterogeneity in cross-country bank efficiency comparisons

In this article, we investigate the significance of the heterogeneity problem in banking efficiency research by using stochastic frontier techniques. The cost frontier function is estimated on a sample of banks from new European Union members from Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltics (CEEB) for the 1998–2007 period. The results imply that environmental variables can only partly control for the presence of heterogeneity in the sample. By employing the ‘true’ random‐effects model as originally proposed by Greene (2005a, 2005b), the unobserved heterogeneity that is typically associated with the complexity of the banking environment is additionally taken into account. This approach is found to result in considerably smaller differences in average country efficiency levels, which implies that CEEB countries represent a relatively homogeneous group in terms of bank performance.

Gas Distribution Benchmarking of Utilities from Slovenia, the Netherlands and the UK: an Application of Data Envelopment Analysis

Gas Distribution Benchmarking of Utilities from Slovenia, the Netherlands and the UK: an Application of Data Envelopment Analysis This paper carries out non-parametric relative efficiency comparisons using an international sample of gas distribution utilities from two old and one new EU members, namely the Netherlands, the UK, and Slovenia. By conducting DEA on a cross-sectional sample of gas utilities, we discover that, on average, Slovenian utilities perform less efficiently than UK and Dutch utilities. To a large extent, this is due to the less extensive regulation of the Slovenian gas industry as seen in the past. The incentive-based price-cap regulation recently introduced in Slovenia could help close this efficiency gap over time. The authors also find out that different model specifications lead to very similar efficiency scores and rankings, implying that benchmarking can be employed as a useful complementary instrument for monitoring utility performance. In this way, the informational asymmetry between distribution utilities and regulatory authorities can be significantly mitigated. For the wider and more successful implementation of international benchmarking in the future, it is also important that coherent regional and international data is made available to regulators.

Determinants of residential heating preferences in Slovenia

Slovenian National Energy Efficiency Action Plan (NEEAP, 2008) proposes a set of measures in order to achieve the efficient use of energy, which is seen as an important component of sustainable economic development. As one of the adopted instruments aims at promoting the installation of energy-efficient heating systems, this paper investigates the factors that influence the residential heating preferences of Slovenian households. We found that the choice of residential heating type can be well explained by the location and dwelling characteristics. To somewhat lesser extent, preferences for certain heating type are also influenced by several socio-demographic and economic characteristics of households. In the future the introduction of financial incentives followed by awareness-raising campaigns and provision of relevant information could play an important role in stimulating sustainable energy use of Slovenian households.