doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1596/40156

Person:
Gencer, Defne

ESMAP, The World Bank

Fields of Specialization

Energy Policy, Regulation, Sector Reform, Energy Efficiency, and Clean Energy Development

External Links

World Bank Blogs

Departments

ESMAP, The World Bank

Last updated: November 6, 2024

Biography

Defne Gencer is a Senior Energy Specialist leading the Energy Subsidy Reform Facility at ESMAP. Prior to joining ESMAP, she worked as a Senior Energy Specialist in the Bank’s Energy and Extractives Global Practice in the South Asia Region, focusing on energy sector reform, policy and regulation, energy efficiency, sustainable cooling, and agriculture-water energy nexus topics in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Earlier, she worked in the East Asia and Pacific Region, focusing on energy efficiency, renewable energy, rural electrification, regional power trade, and energy sector policy and reform engagements in Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Philippines, and Vietnam. Before joining the World Bank, she worked for an energy regulatory agency, a private international energy major, and an international policy think tank in Washington DC. Defne has an MA from Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), with a concentration in energy and international finance.

Full item page

Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 12

From Ambition to Action: Practical Insights on Energy Subsidy Reforms
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-10-22) Gencer, Defne; Arizu, Beatriz
Each year, governments around the world collectively spend billions of dollars subsidizing the production and consumption of electricity, fossil fuels, or district heating. These subsidies cause economywide distortions and encourage excessive and inefficient consumption of energy. In both developing countries and advanced economies, governments often subsidize energy sources and carriers, ranging from petroleum products such as gasoline, diesel, liquefied gas or kerosene, to electricity or district heating. This practice diverts funding from more pressing priorities such as healthcare, education, the fight against hunger, or supporting renewable energy. Energy subsidies often are intended to lower energy costs for the poor, but the broad application of price subsidies ends up disproportionately benefiting richer households who consume more energy. While the case for reforming energy subsidies is clear, implementing such reforms is politically and technically challenging. These reforms require substantial efforts to develop, and success is hard to define, achieve, and maintain. Building on ESMAP’s Energy Subsidy Reform Assessment Framework (ESRAF) and drawing on recent research plus a decade of experience with country-specific technical assistance, the report consolidates those findings and presents energy subsidy reform practitioners with a series of steps that can be considered while supporting subsidy reform efforts. The steps include gaining a solid understanding of the background, effects, and socio-economic motivations for energy subsidies. The steps suggest developing several reform options, obtaining a clear understanding of the reforms’ effects on stakeholders, and building mitigation measures and benefits for society and the economy into reform design. They also advise to be strategic about timing and sequencing of reform and to communicate meaningfully and clearly with the public about the reforms. The report was preceded by a series of technical background reports covering a range of topics including macroeconomic modeling, distributional analysis, social protection, and political economy.
Total Carbon Pricing for Energy Consumption: The Importance of Energy Taxes and Subsidies
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-05-13) Agnolucci, Paolo; Gencer, Defne; Heine, Dirk
Faced with the urgency of climate change mitigation, many governments around the world are considering and deploying different approaches to pricing greenhouse gas emissions. The efforts to put a price on carbon, aiming to reflect the social and environmental costs resulting from these emissions, have traditionally focused on carbon taxes and emissions trading systems. Governments use a broader set of energy, climate, and fiscal policy instruments that affect the price signal on carbon emissions, even when sending such a signal is not stated as an explicit objective. In addition to decisions related to emissions trading or carbon taxes, governments take actions that influence the prices of the fuels that generate those emissions, whether by directly setting retail prices, providing energy consumption subsidies, or levying energy taxes. Carbon price signals resulting from the combination of multiple policy instruments at one time are often unclear. Building on this observation, this report asks, how do different energy, climate, and fiscal policy instruments that affect the price of carbon interact And what overall price signal do these direct and indirect ways of pricing carbon send to the economy To answer these questions, the report adopts the concept of the total carbon price (TCP), introduced in Agnolucci et al. (2023a; 2023b), to estimate the net carbon price signal resulting from the most deployed energy, climate, and fiscal policy instruments that affect the price of carbon emissions. To show how the concept of TCP can be applied to understanding the interaction of these different policy instruments, this report carries out illustrative calculations using best-available multicountry data sets, with a special focus on energy subsidies.
Firm-Level Effects of Energy Price Increases: Evidence and Insights from Recent Research
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-07-19) Amann, Juergen; Gencer, Defne; Heine, Dirk
Energy is an essential production input for firms. Governments around the world have been subsidizing the production and consumption of energy for decades. By reforming energy subsidies, governments can reduce some of the distortions affecting how firms mix production inputs to generate output. Although there is extensive academic literature and policy debate about the impacts of energy subsidies and their reform focusing on households, much more limited research and evidence had been available on firm-level effects. From 2010 onward, there has been a growing amount of research examining the various ways in which firms are affected by energy price changes. These recent papers explore how and the extent to which energy price changes affect firms of different sizes, capacities, and setups across various sectors. This paper reviews recent research on the firm-level impacts of energy price increases, documents emerging themes and insights, and offers recommendations for dimensions that can be considered in future work.
Approaches and Insights from Recent Research on Energy Subsidy Reform
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-05-01) Bacon, Robert; Gencer, Defne
This report summarizes the findings of a review aimed at understanding emerging approaches to energy subsidy reform, discerning trends, and identifying major strands of thinking and research in the field, as reflected in major policy and academic journals relevant to the subject. The review was initiated in early 2020 as part of a multiyear stocktaking study on energy subsidy reform experiences in developing countries by the ESMAP Energy Subsidy Reform Facility (ESRF). The study objectives were achieved through a two-stage process involving screening of select policy and academic journals focusing on energy policy, economics, and other related fields. The process was used to identify relevant articles on energy subsidy reform and explore themes and trends related to scope, substance, and messaging. The review focused on identifying recent trends in the selected literature, in particular the coverage, focus, themes, and approaches related to energy subsidy reforms. Recent literature was compared with earlier approaches, and commonalities and changes in methodology and focus were documented.
Macroeconomic Modeling and Energy Subsidy Reform Policy Dialogue
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-12-22) Njinkeu, Dominique; Djiofack, Calvin; Gencer, Defne; Beyene, Lulit Mitik; Alli, Mosuru Olukayode
The report explores modeling approaches, designs, and impacts of CGE modeling exercises carried out for energy subsidy reforms in different country settings. The report reviews approaches used as part of operational and analytical engagements supported by the World Bank, including those funded by ESMAP, as well as activities by other institutions. The review considers four main dimensions: (1) energy subsidy reform context and challenges, (2) transmission channels covered by the model, (3) data collection and consolidation process, and (4) key model parameters, including calibration of shocks, choice of elasticities, and others. The review explores the ways in which CGE models were adapted for the situations in which they were used, and how they informed energy subsidy reform design and implementation, paying attention to the drivers, impacts, and lessons from the use of these models. Finally, the report offers insights, conclusions, and considerations for future work on CGE modeling supporting energy subsidy reform, with attention to the choice of approach, data availability, and capacity needs for effective modeling that can render analytical results that are useful for policy engagements. Given the strong case for using CGE in energy subsidy reform engagements, the report draws practical insights and lessons for future work.
Political Economy Analysis and Communications for Energy Subsidy Reform: Approaches and Insights from Recent Technical Assistance
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-04-17) Moerenhout, Tom; Gencer, Defne; Arizu, Beatriz; Lee, Min A; Braun, Hannah
This report takes stock of political economy analysis (PEA) and communications in the context of country-specific technical assistance activities supporting energy subsidy reforms that benefited from financial and technical support from ESMAP. Initiated as part of a retrospective assessment of technical assistance activities that ESRF has supported since its establishment, this report reviews designs and implementation approaches of World Bank–executed technical assistance activities. The assessment is based on a qualitative review of key outputs of select PEA and communications support activities carried out in the context of country grants. The report documents different approaches, assesses activity designs and outputs, and attempts to draw insights from emerging practices and substantive findings, along with making recommendations for future work. Key questions include, What practical approaches are used for providing technical and advisory support to developing-country governments for political economy assessments and communications strategies in support of energy subsidy reform efforts? What good practice examples are available for assessing political economy dimensions, using them to inform reform designs by addressing key impacts and concerns identified and conducting meaningful stakeholder engagement to explain the reform and build support?
Distributional Analysis for Informing Energy Subsidy Reforms: Review of Recent Approaches
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-10-10) Olivier, Anne; Matytsin, Mikhail; Gencer, Defne
This report aims to contribute to the global knowledge base on energy subsidy reform by exploring how poverty and distributional analyses have been used tosupport energy subsidy reform efforts. To this end, this report reviews select country-specific activities supported by the Energy Sector Management Assistance Program (ESMAP) and its Energy Subsidy Reform Facility (ESRF). The report begins by providing an overview of key distributional issues related to energy subsidy reforms and emerging lessons from a global stocktaking of practices, as well as country-specific insights from case studies. The report then discusses different approaches to the use of distributional analysis for gaining an understanding of the impacts of energy subsidy reforms in select country contexts, specifically in Guinea, Indonesia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.
Cash Transfers in the Context of Energy Subsidy Reform: Insights from Recent Experience
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-06-30) Mukherjee, Anit; Okamura, Yuko; Gentilini, Ugo; Gencer, Defne; Almenfi, Mohamed; Kryeziu, Adea; Montenegro, Miriam; Umapathi, Nithin
Energy subsidies, which have a long history of use by governments around the world, have been rising in recent years after a brief period of decline. Despite their significant wider costs, subsidies are used by governments for various policy, and political, reasons. Faced with recent external shocks, governments around the world have had to manage difficult tradeoffs between the need to protect their citizens against substantial increases in the cost of living and the fiscal risks that greater and continued subsidies impose. General consumption subsidies, such as universal price subsidies for fossil fuels, tend to be regressive. Over the past several decades, as part of the evolving understanding of energy subsidy reforms, there has been growing recognition of the potential of targeted cash transfers to support the poor and vulnerable to help governments achieve desired policy outcomes at lower fiscal cost and in a sustainable manner. The use of cash transfers to mitigate the impact of price increases from an energy subsidy reform puts a country’s social protection framework in the spotlight, along with the role social protection can play in bolstering national commitments to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. While getting prices right is important in eliminating distortions and incentivizing efficient use of energy, cash transfers can help countries mitigate and adapt to climate change and make the transition to a green economy by smoothing the adjustment to changing energy costs.
New Approaches for Medium-Scale Hydropower Development in Vietnam: Lessons from Preparation of the Trung Son Hydropower Project
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2012-01-01) Gencer, Defne
This paper provides an overview of the Trung Son hydropower project preparation experience and highlights the innovative features of the project, primarily focusing on the adoption of new approaches in project design and integration of social and environmental concerns. Through disseminating the Trung Son project experience, this paper is intended to contribute to the sustainable scale-up of medium scale hydropower in Vietnam, based on practical experience. This paper was funded by the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) as part of a broader activity supporting sustainable hydropower development in Vietnam. Resources from the AusAID-East Asia infrastructure for growth trust fund supplemented those available to the World Bank task team in charge of the project. This paper is made up of three parts: Part A introduces the Trung Son hydropower project. Part B presents highlights from the Trung Son hydropower project, focusing on the main themes addressed during preparation. Part C contains the authors' conclusions about why the Trung Son hydropower project experience matters, and discusses the features that make it a good example for future scale-up of sustainable hydropower development in Vietnam as well as for hydropower development in other countries.
State and People, Central and Local, Working Together: The Vietnam Rural Electrification Experience
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2011-03) Gencer, Defne; Meier, Peter; Spencer, Richard; Van, Hung Tien; Gencer, Defne
This book chronicles the development of Vietnam's rural electrification program. It tells the story of how the Vietnamese government conceived, developed, scaled up, and improved its program. It also discusses the role the government, the countries main utility, local authorities, local communities, and the country's international development partners played in the pursuit of the electrification agenda. The book provides an overview of the strategies that fueled the impressive expansion of access to electricity in Vietnam, the development of the institutions that implemented the program and the passage of policies and laws that made growth of such scale possible. It also discusses results from the ground, and particularly the impacts of electrification on people's lives. It concludes with an attempt to draw lessons from Vietnam's experience. The book comprises three main parts: part A, made up of eight sections, provides an overview of Vietnam's rural electrification experience, which can be divided into six distinct periods. Part B summarizes a select set of findings from the multiyear survey and discusses the impact of rural electrification on Vietnamese households. Part C draws lessons from the experience of rural electrification in Vietnam, based on the information presented in parts A and B. It discusses the lessons learned from the perspectives of the government and the World Bank.