Assessing Wood-Energy Pricing Policies in Urban Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso)

Type Journal Article - International Journal of Energy Science
Title Assessing Wood-Energy Pricing Policies in Urban Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso)
Author(s)
Publication (Day/Month/Year) 2013
URL http://dpi-journals.com/index.php/IJES/article/download/375/323
Abstract
Burkina Faso has been running many interventions in the
energy sector over the last decades. Still, there is a dearth of
reliable and ready available price and income elasticities of
demand to base these on, especially for domestic use of
traditional fuels. The paper uses an Almost Ideal demand
system (AIDS) model to explain the failures of wood-energy
pricing and substitution policies. With the consumers’
preferences strong separability assumption, income elasticities
of AIDS model are estimated; the use of the formula of
Frisch (1959) allowed computing own-  and cross-price
elasticities. A relative inelasticity is observed for.wood-
energy demand compared to households income and fuel
price. This low sensitivity of the wood-energy compared to
its own price and households’ income confirms the strong
dependency of these households to fuel wood. Moreover,
hicksian cross price elasticities between wood-energy and
other fuels reveal substitution relations.    The low income
and own- and cross-price elasticities of wood-energy explain
why substitution and price policies do not operate well and
have a very weak impact on the fall in the demand of the
wood-energy.

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