マラウイ村落社会経済調査結果を使った開発途上国電力開発プロジェクトの支払意思額による経済評価手法の事例
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Power development has been an important field of infrastructure development in developing countries over the past decades. During the planning stage, an economic analysis plays a vital role for appraising economic viability of master plan and feasibility studies. The practical method of economic analysis employed by these studies has consisted of either an alternative thermal power method or long-run marginal cost method. The alternative thermal power method compares two cost streams, one for a hydropower project under study and the other for an alternative thermal power project, and identifies the method that costs the least to supply power. The long-run marginal cost method measures necessary costs to increase power supply by one unit in an economy. While these methods have been employed for past economic analyses, cost-benefit analysis, which provides the framework for economic analysis, is constructed on the concept of willingness to pay. However, the method of economic analysis based on the concept of willingness to pay has hardly been employed for power projects. At the same time, manuals and guidelines published by the World Bank and Asian Development Bank mostly explain fundamental methods of economic analysis and common topics among different sectors such as derivation of economic costs. However, practical methods for deriving economic benefits, which differ in different sectors, have not been extensively explained. Therefore, the purpose of this case study was to confirm and explain the method of economic analysis based on the concept of willingness to pay in the framework of cost-benefit analysis, and to show a practical way for calculating economic benefits based on the willingness to pay method using data and information collected in Malawi. The resulting economic electricity price in Malawi was 0.166 US$/kWh for the boarder price, which seems to reasonably reflect economic scarcity of electricity in Malawi. Economic price for the domestic price was also calculated as 11.01 Malawi Kwacha (MK)/kWh, while the existing electricity price was 1.35 MK/kWh, suggesting that electricity is too cheap in Malawi to attain economic efficiency. The household electrification rate was only 7% in 2007, indicating very cheap electricity is an inappropriate tariff policy in Malawi. It was also found the willingness to pay method is able to incorporate geographical features into the calculation of economic price, because this method derives economic price from the consumer. This feature is not entailed in the long-run marginal cost method for which the economic value is derived from the supplier. In addition to these features, the case study identified issues for increasing the reliability of this method. One issue is how to obtain reliable data for calculating the upper limit of the willingness to pay, and another is how to choose the percentage of area that represents the consumers surplus.JEL Classification: D61, Q48