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  1. / IGC
  2. / Publications

Electricity is not a right (paper)

Working paper 9 Sep 2019 Energy

Authors

Robin Burgess

Director, IGC and Professor of Economics, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

Michael Greenstone

Milton Friedman Professor of Economics, University of Chicago

Nicholas Ryan

Associate Professor of Economics, Yale University

Anant Sudarshan

Associate Professor, Department of Economics, University of Warwick
  • Paper_Electricity-is-not-a-right.pdf Download

    PDF document • 1.14 MB

Electricity courses through our lives. Yet, there are still more than a billion people worldwide who are not connected to the grid, and many more get abysmal supply, unlike the 24/7/365 flow that rich countries take for granted. We argue that these shortfalls are due to a sad irony: treating electricity as a right for the poor has limited electricity access.

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