Person:
Banerjee, Sudeshna
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Infrastructure economics; energy access; monitoring and evaluation
Degrees
ORCID
Departments
Energy Unit, Sustainable Energy Department, World Bank
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
January 31, 2023
Biography
Sudeshna Banerjee is a Senior Economist in the Sustainable Energy Department of the World Bank. She has worked on energy and infrastructure issues in the South Asia and Africa departments in both operations and analytic assignments. She focuses on project economics, monitoring and evaluation, and on a broad range of energy sector issues including energy access, energy subsidies, renewable energy, and sector assessments. Ms. Banerjee holds a Ph.D in Public Policy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and M.A. and B.A. degrees in Economics from Delhi University.
Publication Search Results
1 - 9 of 9
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Exploring Housing Subsidies to Households in Russia
( 2008)Since the early 1990s, the Russian government has undertaken a series of reforms intended to change the system from one where housing and communal services (HCSs) were nearly free to one where residents paid the costs of their housing while protecting vulnerable families. Although households payments have increased, subsidies for HCSs remain substantial (about 4 per cent of GDP) and are exceeded only by public spending for pensions. This paper uses newly available data to analyse recipients of the two major housing subsidy programs. We find that neither l'goti (which are not targeted) nor allowances (which are supposed to be targeted) have provided much protection for poorer households from tariff increases. -
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Is Low Coverage of Modern Infrastructure Services in African Cities due to Lack of Demand or Lack of Supply?
( 2009-03-01)A majority of sub-Saharan Africa s population is not connected to electricity and piped water networks, and even in urban areas coverage is low. Lack of network coverage may be due to demand or supply-side factors. Some households may live in areas where access to piped water and electricity is feasible, but may not be able to pay for those services. Other households may be able to afford the services, but may live too far from the electric line or water pipe to have a choice to be connected to it. Given that the policy options for dealing with demand as opposed to supply-side issues are fairly different, it is important to try to measure the contributions of both types of factors in preventing better coverage of infrastructure services in the population. This paper shows how this can be done empirically using household survey data and provides results on the magnitude of both types of factors in explaining the coverage deficit of piped water and electricity services in urban areas for a large sample of African countries. -
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Trends in Household Coverage of Modern Infrastructure Services in Africa
( 2009-03-01)Household surveys have long been used to estimate poverty and inequality trends, as well as trends in education and health indicators, but they have not been used to the same extent to assess trends in the access to or coverage of modern infrastructure services. In this paper, we use Demographic and Health Surveys from a larger sample of sub-Saharan African countries in order to collect comparable information across countries on coverage of piped water, flush toilets, electricity, and landline telephones over time. The results suggest that coverage rates for electricity, flush toilets have improved slightly over the last decade. Coverage of piped water has declined, at the same time as coverage of landline (as well as cellular) telephone has increased rapidly. The decline has been primarily in the urban areas while the infrastructure coverage has either increased or remained stable in rural Africa. For all four services, among the poorest households coverage remains virtually inexistent. If business as usual continues, it would take a very long time to reach universal or widely shared coverage even in countries where coverage has improved. These results point to the need to increase efforts by governments and international community to progressively increase access to modern infrastructure services in Africa. -
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Ghana : Poverty and Social Impact Analysis of Electricity Tariffs
( 2005-12-01)The World Bank's assistance was requested to conduct a Poverty and Social Impact Analysis assessing the direct and indirect impacts, as well as options for electricity pricing for the poor. Results of three different instruments (a small scale household survey focusing on consumer and social impact assessments of tariff changes, the analysis of a an existing nationally representative household survey and a stakeholder analysis) pointed to a rather high potential of the lifeline mechanism to protect the poor, but also showed that the knowledge of this subsidy and hence its coverage is much lower in rural areas. While the poor protecting mechanism seems quite effective, broader sector reforms threaten its sustainability (i.e., allowing larger customers to directly negotiate price conditions with the electricity company might increase the pressure on tariff adjustments for other customer groups, strain utility's finances and inhibit or slow connections of less profitable customers. -
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Access, Affordability, and Alternatives : Modern Infrastructure Services in Africa
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-02)Africa lags well behind other developing regions in infrastructure access. The limited gains of the 1990s have not increased much in the 2000s. There is clear evidence that many countries are failing to expand services fast enough to keep ahead of rapid demographic growth and even faster urbanization. As a result, if present trends continue, Africa is likely to lag even further behind other developing regions, and universal access will be more than 50 years away in many countries. However, there is variation in performance across countries, even within the low and middle income brackets. A significant number of countries have succeeded in increasing the number of people who have access to water, electricity, and sanitation, by an annual average of 5-10 percent. Further investigation is warranted to explain what determines the superior performance of these countries. -
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Measuring Trends in Access to Modern Infrastructure in Sub-Saharan Africa : Results from Demographic and Health Surveys
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-10)A recent study for sub-Saharan Africa by Banerjee et al. (2007) uses Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) from 22 countries that have conducted at least two such surveys between 1990 and 2005 in order to collect comparable information across countries on access to modern and alternative infrastructure services over time. In addition to national, urban, and rural trends in access, the study includes a distributional analysis of how access rates have evolved since 1990. That is, households are divided into five quintiles of population according to their level of wealth, with wealth defined using a principal components analysis. The objective of this note is to provide a summary of key findings from the study regarding access trends to electricity, piped water, flush toilets, and landline telephones over the period 1990-2005. -
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People and Power : Electricity Sector Reforms and the Poor in Europe and Central Asia
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2007)Empirical insights on household behavior and electricity consumption patterns in this book reveal that, in Europe and Central Asia, the erosion of tariff based subsidies has disproportionately affected the poor, while direct transfers through social benefit systems have often been inadequately targeted. The book suggests alternative strategies for achieving cost-recovery in the electricity sector in a socially and politically acceptable manner, providing lessons that are equally relevant for other utilities and regions. -
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Africa - Ebbing Water, Surging Deficits : Urban Water Supply in Sub-Saharan Africa
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-06)With only 56 percent of the population enjoying access to safe water, Sub-Saharan Africa lags behind other regions in terms of access to improved water sources. Based on present trends, it appears that the region is unlikely to meet the target of 75 percent access to improved water by 2015, as specified in the Millennium Development Goals (MDG). The welfare implications of safe water cannot be overstated. The estimated health and time-saving benefits of meeting the MDG goal are about 11 times as high as the associated costs. Monitoring the progress of infrastructure sectors such as water supply has been a significant by-product of the MDG, and serious attention and funding have been devoted in recent years to developing systems for monitoring and evaluating in developing countries. Piped water reaches more urban Africans than any other form of water supply-but not as large a share as it did in the early 1990s. The most recent available data for 32 countries suggests that some 39 percent of the urban population of Sub-Saharan Africa is connected to a piped network, compared with 50 percent in the early 1990s. Analysis suggests that the majority of those who lack access to utility water live too far away from the distribution network, although some fail to connect even when they live close by. Water-sector institutions follow no consistent pattern in Sub-Saharan Africa. Where service is centralized, a significant minority has chosen to combine power and water services into a single national multi-utility urban water sector reforms were carried out in the 1990s, with the aim of creating commercially oriented utilities and bringing the sector under formal regulation. One goal of the reforms was to attract private participation in the sector. -
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A Case of the Tortoise Versus the Hare? Deregulation Process, Timing, and Firm Performance in Emerging Markets
( 2008)The objective of this paper is to examine the relationships between the pace of insurance industry deregulation, the time since the process of deregulation began, and insurance firm performance in emerging markets. Also examined are performance differences between foreign and local insurers. These relationships are examined across different country and regional contexts using a time-series cross-section data set including 383 companies in 31 emerging market countries between the years 1998 and 2003. Results of the analysis suggest that regional differences in the pace of deregulation are significantly related to firm performance. Specifically, firms located in countries that took a rapid approach to insurance deregulation had significantly lower performance than firms in countries where the process was slower and more deliberate. Further, the longer the time since insurance sector deregulation began, the lower the financial performance for all firms. Foreign firms did not have significantly higher performance than local insurers indicating that, at least in this sample and time period, foreign firms do not seem to have a competitive advantage over local firms post-deregulation. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.