Publication: Cross-Border Electricity Cooperation in South Asia
Loading...
Published
2015-06
ISSN
Date
2015-07-17
Editor(s)
Abstract
South Asian countries, facing challenges in efficiently meeting growing electricity demand, can benefit from increased cross-border electricity cooperation and trade by harnessing complementarities in electricity demand patterns, diversity in resource endowments for power generation, and gains from larger market access. The region has witnessed slow progress in expanding regional electricity cooperation and trade, and undertaking needed domestic sector reforms. Although bilateral electricity sector cooperation in the region is increasing, broader regional cooperation and trade initiatives have lagged in the face of regional barriers and domestic sector inefficiencies. Deeper electricity market reforms are not a necessity for further development of cross-border electricity trade, but limited progress in overcoming regional and domestic barriers will limit the scope of the regional market and the benefits it can provide.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Singh, Anoop; Jamasb, Tooraj; Nepal, Rabindra; Toman, Michael. 2015. Cross-Border Electricity Cooperation in South Asia. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 7328. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/22206 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Digital Object Identifier
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Publication The Macroeconomic Implications of Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Options(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29)Estimating the macroeconomic implications of climate change impacts and adaptation options is a topic of intense research. This paper presents a framework in the World Bank's macrostructural model to assess climate-related damages. This approach has been used in many Country Climate and Development Reports, a World Bank diagnostic that identifies priorities to ensure continued development in spite of climate change and climate policy objectives. The methodology captures a set of impact channels through which climate change affects the economy by (1) connecting a set of biophysical models to the macroeconomic model and (2) exploring a set of development and climate scenarios. The paper summarizes the results for five countries, highlighting the sources and magnitudes of their vulnerability --- with estimated gross domestic product losses in 2050 exceeding 10 percent of gross domestic product in some countries and scenarios, although only a small set of impact channels is included. The paper also presents estimates of the macroeconomic gains from sector-level adaptation interventions, considering their upfront costs and avoided climate impacts and finding significant net gross domestic product gains from adaptation opportunities identified in the Country Climate and Development Reports. Finally, the paper discusses the limits of current modeling approaches, and their complementarity with empirical approaches based on historical data series. The integrated modeling approach proposed in this paper can inform policymakers as they make proactive decisions on climate change adaptation and resilience.Publication South Africa’s Fragmented Cities: The Unequal Burden of Labor Market Frictions(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2026-01-08)Using high-resolution administrative, census, and satellite data, this paper shows that South African cities are characterized by spatial mismatches between where people live and where jobs are located, relative to 20 global peers. Areas within 5 kilometers of commercial centers have 9,300 fewer residents per square kilometer than expected, which is 60 percent below the global median. Poor, dense neighborhoods are most affected. In Johannesburg, a 10-percentile increase in distance from the nearest business hub corresponds to a 3.7-percentile drop in asset wealth (a proxy of household wellbeing) and 4.9-percentile drop in employment. In Cape Town, the declines are 4.0 and 3.7 percentiles, respectively. Employment is 87 percent lower in the poorest decile than the richest in Johannesburg and 61 percent lower in Cape Town. These findings suggest that South Africa’s spatial organization of people and economic activity constrains agglomeration and reinforces inequality. This methodology provides a scalable and standardized data-driven framework to analyze spatial accessibility and agglomeration frictions in complex, data-constrained urban systems.Publication The Evolution of Local Participatory Democracy in Nepal(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-11-05)Nepal is, according to its constitution, among the world’s most decentralized countries, with a long and complex tradition of local-level public participation. This paper traces the evolution of Nepal’s modern participatory institutions, examining the extent to which they are “induced” by external interventions versus being “organically” rooted in indigenous practices. The paper identifies three broad phases: an initial focus on participation in project implementation; a subsequent phase that expanded citizen engagement; and a third phase of citizen empowerment, culminating in the 2015 federal constitution, which granted unprecedented local autonomy. The analysis yields five key findings. First, over the past 50 years, successive reforms have progressively expanded opportunities for citizens to influence local decision-making. Second, these reforms have integrated traditional participatory mechanisms into formal institutions of local government. Third, although central-level initiatives exist, most participatory platforms continue to operate at the local level. Fourth, the federal constitution has created a new landscape of local democracy, embedding autonomy and accountability. Fifth, although they are still valued in many ethnic and territorial communities, traditional participatory practices are gradually disappearing. The paper concludes by offering policy recommendations to help donor agencies and governments strengthen Nepal’s democratic trajectory. It argues that effective interventions should build on Nepal’s deep participatory traditions while recognizing the constitutional reality of far-reaching local autonomy.Publication Institutional Capacity for Policy Implementation: An Analytical Framework(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2026-01-07)State capacity is an important prerequisite for policy implementation, yet at the country level it is difficult to measure, assess, and reform. This paper proposes a focus on institutional capacity: the ability of public institutions to implement the specific policy mandates for which they are responsible. Based on a review of existing literature, the paper defines the different dimensions that compose institutional capacity and groups them into two cross-cutting categories: organizational dimensions (personnel, financial resources, information systems, and management practices) and governance dimensions (transparency, independence, and accountability). The paper proposes measures for organizational and governance dimensions using existing data, shows intra-institutional variation of these measures within countries, and discusses how new data could be collected for better measurement of these concepts. Finally, the paper illustrates how the framework can be used to diagnose the sources of common problems related to weak policy implementation.Publication Closing the Gender Gap in Entrepreneurship: Overcoming Challenges in Law and Practice for Female Entrepreneurs(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2026-01-07)Despite significant strides toward gender equality, women around the world continue to encounter systemic obstacles that hinder their entrepreneurial success. This paper systematically reviews the literature on the barriers female entrepreneurs face and the solutions proposed to overcome these challenges. It discusses institutional factors, financial factors, human capital factors, and social and cultural factors. The literature overview is complemented by a series of stylized facts that illustrate how overcoming some of these existing barriers is correlated with improved women’s entrepreneurship and female labor force participation, drawing on the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law database as well as the World Bank’s Enterprise Surveys. The findings underscore the need for creating an enabling environment where women can thrive as entrepreneurs.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Energizing Economic Growth in Ghana : Making the Power and Petroleum Sectors Rise to the Challenge(Washington, DC, 2013-06)The main objective of this report is to provide the new Government of Ghana with recommendations on the actions needed to improve the performance of Ghana's energy sector. The report focuses on the power and petroleum sectors, taking account of the interdependence between the sectors, and providing recommendations for how they can, together, drive future economic growth. This report aims to highlight the centrality of fixing the problems in the power sector as a path to ensuring that Ghana's economic growth ambitions are not stymied by a lack of electricity. The problems and their solutions are well known; what has been lacking is decisive and timely decision making to break the tendency to adopt reactive measures that often come too late when proactive measures will have led to better outcomes. Demand for gas in the power sector is set to expand rapidly, as new thermal generation capacity is built to meet rapidly growing power demand. However, to ensure successful development of its gas sector, Ghana will need to address a number of important challenges. The paper is organized as follows: chapter one gives introduction; chapter two deals with electricity demand and supply; chapter three deals with resolving generation and transmission bottlenecks; chapter four gives reforms urgently needed in power distribution; chapter five focuses on natural gas sector; and chapter six focuses on upstream oil and gas sector.Publication Hydroelectric Power(Washington, DC, 2015)Worldwide, hydropower is a crucial power supply option for several reasons. First, it is a renewable energy resource that can contribute to sustainable development by generating local, typically inexpensive power. Second, hydropower reduces reliance on imported fuels that carry the risks of price volatility, supply uncertainty and foreign currency requirements. Third, hydro systems can offer multiple co-benefits including water storage for drinking and irrigation, drought-preparedness, flood control protection, aquaculture and recreational opportunities, among others. Finally, hydro can allow more renewables, especially wind and solar, to be added to the system by providing rapid-response power when intermittent sources are off-line, and pumped energy storage when such sources are generating excess power. For more publications on IFC Sustainability please visit www.ifc.org/sustainabilitypublications.Publication Peru : Overcoming the Barriers to Hydropower(Washington, DC, 2010-05)Hydropower has been the major source of electricity in Peru, traditionally supplying more than 80 percent of electricity requirements, and serving as a source of independent generation for major mines and industries. With the development of natural gas in the early 1990s, and the opening of the Camisea pipeline, the Government of Peru's (GOP's) attention turned to providing incentives for the use of natural gas in power generation. This resulted in a virtual moratorium on hydropower development as a result of the very low price of natural gas (below economic cost). With the development of export markets for gas and increased attention to the impacts of climate change, the Government has recently begun to pay renewed attention to hydropower. Recent developments include: (a) introduction of accelerated depreciation for hydropower investments; (b) introduction of a "discount" to permit hydropower to compete with gas-fired plants in auctions; and (c) announcement of a special hydropower auction to be held in 2009 by ProInversion, the state agency for promoting private investment. The intention of this report is to assist the GOP in assessing the potential role of hydropower in the sector and the measures that could be taken to encourage its continued development as appropriate. The study was done at a particularly challenging time. First, there was considerable volatility in energy prices and investment costs, which needed to be incorporated into the analysis. Second, financial markets were in disarray and it was difficult to predict when conditions were likely to normalize. Third, the GOP recently introduced many new policies and regulatory measures through supreme decrees that are changing the regulatory system and may interact in unexpected ways.Publication Handshake, No. 13 (April 2014)(Washington, DC, 2014-04)This issue of Handshake, focused on public-private partnerships in the power sector, brings diverse expert voices together to discuss how to increase access to energy in developing countries. Features on hydropower and renewables together with examples from Africa and Latin America provide an up-to-the-minute look at one of the most important and rapidly evolving sectors today. This issue includes the following headings: power and mining: digging deep to power up; market mover: intraday electricity trading; timeline to transformation: Nigerias privatization; energy for development: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MITs) new research; and interview: United Nation (UN) sustainable energy for all (SE4ALL) special representative Kandeh Yumkella. Whats it like to be energy-poor? Kandeh Yumkella, Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary General for Sustainable Energy for All, answers that question and many more in this issue of Handshake. Yumkella recalls his own experiences in Sierra Leone to illustrate the link between energy poverty and income poverty and explains how PPPs can help.Publication How Much Could South Asia Benefit from Regional Electricity Cooperation and Trade?(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-06)The South Asia region is lagging behind many regions in the world in regional electricity cooperation and trading, despite the huge anticipated benefits. This study uses an electricity planning model that produces optimal expansion of electricity generation capacities and transmission interconnections in the long-term to quantify the benefits of unrestricted cross-border electricity trade in the South Asia during 2015–40. The study finds that the unrestricted electricity trade provision would save US$226 billion (US$9 billion per year) of electricity supply costs over the period. The ratio of the present value of benefits, in the form of reduction of fuel costs, to the present value of increased costs due to generation and interconnection would be 5.3. The provision would reduce regional power sector carbon dioxide emissions by 8 percent, mainly because of substitution of coal-based generation with hydro-based generation, although regional emissions would be well above current levels absent other policy interventions. To achieve these benefits, the region is estimated to add 95,000 megawatts of new cross-border transmission interconnection capacity.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Digital Africa(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-03-13)All African countries need better and more jobs for their growing populations. "Digital Africa: Technological Transformation for Jobs" shows that broader use of productivity-enhancing, digital technologies by enterprises and households is imperative to generate such jobs, including for lower-skilled people. At the same time, it can support not only countries’ short-term objective of postpandemic economic recovery but also their vision of economic transformation with more inclusive growth. These outcomes are not automatic, however. Mobile internet availability has increased throughout the continent in recent years, but Africa’s uptake gap is the highest in the world. Areas with at least 3G mobile internet service now cover 84 percent of Africa’s population, but only 22 percent uses such services. And the average African business lags in the use of smartphones and computers as well as more sophisticated digital technologies that catalyze further productivity gains. Two issues explain the usage gap: affordability of these new technologies and willingness to use them. For the 40 percent of Africans below the extreme poverty line, mobile data plans alone would cost one-third of their incomes—in addition to the price of access devices, apps, and electricity. Data plans for small- and medium-size businesses are also more expensive than in other regions. Moreover, shortcomings in the quality of internet services—and in the supply of attractive, skills-appropriate apps that promote entrepreneurship and raise earnings—dampen people’s willingness to use them. For those countries already using these technologies, the development payoffs are significant. New empirical studies for this report add to the rapidly growing evidence that mobile internet availability directly raises enterprise productivity, increases jobs, and reduces poverty throughout Africa. To realize these and other benefits more widely, Africa’s countries must implement complementary and mutually reinforcing policies to strengthen both consumers’ ability to pay and willingness to use digital technologies. These interventions must prioritize productive use to generate large numbers of inclusive jobs in a region poised to benefit from a massive, youthful workforce—one projected to become the world’s largest by the end of this century.Publication The Human Capital Project(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-10-11)By improving their skills, health, knowledge, and resilience—their human capital—people can be more productive, flexible, and innovative. Human capital is a central driver of sustainable growth and poverty reduction. Investments in human capital have become more important as the nature of work has evolved. Yet despite substantial progress, significant gaps in human capital investments are leaving the world poorly prepared for what lies ahead. The World Bank Group has launched the Human Capital Project (HCP) to mobilize efforts to address these gaps. The project is intended to raise awareness of the costs of inaction and make the case for investing in people through country engagement and analytical work. The goal of the HCP is a world in which all children arrive at school ready to learn, the time spent in school translates into better learning, and they can grow up to live and work as healthy, skilled, and productive adults. The main text of this volume—which also appears as chapter 3 in the 2019 World Development Report: The Changing Nature of Work —describes the evidence supporting the importance of human capital for people, economies, and societies and lays out the rationale and context for the HCP’s theory of change. The Human Capital Index methodology is detailed in the appendix.Publication Why Look at Tasks When Designing Skills Policy for the Green Transition? A Methodological Note on How to Identify Green Occupations and the Skills They Require(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-04-17)The coexistence of several definitions of green jobs and measurement instruments gives room for mismatches between those concepts and their application to research questions. This paper first presents an organizing framework for the existing definitions, measurement instruments, and policy frameworks. It then delves into discussing two appropriate approaches for identifying green occupations to guide skills development policy: the task-content and the skills approaches. In the process, it introduces a novel methodology with a dictionary of green terms for identifying green tasks and occupations. This methodology, utilizing text analysis, demonstrates superior performance compared to the well-known O*NET Green Economic Project classification, particularly for developing countries. Lastly, the paper applies this methodology to Indonesia, a middle-income country, and utilizes various data sources to showcase the utility of the dictionary and text analysis exercise.Publication Urbanization in Kazakhstan(Taylor and Francis, 2020-01-03)Kazakhstan’s cities are hubs of economic opportunity and prosperity. But despite the Government’s ambitious targets, the pace of urbanization remains slow. This study focuses on two key constraints: (i) the very high cost-of-living in Kazakhstan’s cities, and (ii) the near absence of a rental housing market outside of the capital, Nur-Sultan. The findings show that the two urban centers of Almaty and Nur-Sultan are 190 and 240 percent more expensive to live in than the national average. Housing is the primary driver of the disparity: after adjusting for inflation, housing costs tripled in Nur-Sultan and quadrupled in Almaty between 2001 and 2015. As a result, housing costs for the local population in these areas are more unaffordable than famously exclusive cities such as San Francisco and Vancouver. Demand elasticities imply that rural and low-income households are especially unlikely to relocate to high-priced areas where employment prospects are better and average incomes are higher. Regional convergence in wage rates remains slow but appears to be proceeding most quickly in Nur-Sultan, where rental housing is most prevalent. The findings suggest that high rates of home ownership and the high cost-of-living in cities leads to exclusion of lower-income households and restrains economic growth.Publication Challenging Cultural Conventions(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-10)In 2006, when the Bihar Rural Livelihoods Project was launched, the state’s rural poverty ratio was 44.6 percent - 36 million of the total 82 million people in Bihar were living in poverty. Bihar is India’s third most populous state with 8 percent of the total population but ranks lowest on the human development index (HDI). Rural communities in the state are often beset by pervasive social inequalities and caste and gender hierarchies. Simultaneously, Bihar has also had a long history of progressive movements that constantly challenged upper caste hegemony. However, these movements have had limited success in address gender inequality - Bihar ranked lowest on the Gender Equality Index with lower caste women facing double subordination. Overall, rural Bihar was characterized by weak service delivery, complex political and social dynamics, limited inclusion of the poor into institutions, few economic opportunities, and a frail development infrastructure. It was in the midst of this that JEEViKA was piloted and implemented.