Gunther Bensch

Gunther Bensch
RWI - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research · Environment and Resources

About

45
Publications
12,007
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
900
Citations

Publications

Publications (45)
Article
Full-text available
Fossil fuel subsidy removal may hinder access to clean fuels like LPG. Our analysis of urban Senegal shows that LPG use fell sharply after subsidies ended in 2009, despite later price drops. Households switched to charcoal, and the new availability of energy-efficient charcoal stoves made a return to LPG less appealing. This highlights how energy t...
Preprint
Full-text available
Claims for removing fossil fuel subsidies in the Global South are based on climate and equity concerns, but they can be at odds with improving access to Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) as a clean cooking fuel. We examine the case of urban Senegal where LPG usage rates were among the highest in sub-Saharan Africa in the late 2000s. Using Demographic a...
Preprint
This paper revisits the instrumental variable (IV) approach in Lipscomb et al. (2013, 2021) to study the impacts of electrification. We first identify errors in the construction of the dataset, including the modelled IV. Revised estimates on main outcomes and mechanisms are statistically insignificant, with substantially lower effect sizes. We seco...
Article
Charcoal is an important cooking fuel in urban Africa. In this paper, we estimate the current number of charcoal users and project trends for the coming decades. Charcoal production is often not effectively regulated, and it hence contributes to forest degradation. Moreover, charcoal has adverse health effects for its users. At the same time, charc...
Preprint
Full-text available
Railways are a key infrastructure that facilitates trade and regional integration with potential consequences on local development and the environment in hitherto backward regions. In this article, we study the medium- to long-term socio-economic and environmental infrastructure impacts for the case of the Konkan Railway, which is one of the bigges...
Article
Improving access to more modern forms of energy requires supply chains that reach further into rural areas. This paper studies a supply-side intervention intended to foster last-mile distribution of energy-access technologies through local small-scale entrepreneurship. We use a staggered-implementation evaluation design to assess the impact on empl...
Article
Nearly three billion people continue to use woodfuels for their daily cooking. The global policy discourse increasingly emphasizes clean fuels, notably gas and electricity, but these are expensive, and their supply chains typically interrupted, especially in rural areas. As an alternative, this paper shows that fuel-efficient biomass stoves could c...
Preprint
This paper replicates and extends the seminal paper by Dinkelman (2011) on the impacts of electrification on female employment. We revisit the validity of the identification strategy that uses the land gradient as an instrumental variable (IV). Our robustness checks cast doubt on the exclusion restriction as the IV drives the outcome variable in no...
Article
Zusammenfassung Zahlreiche Länder und Staatengemeinschaften in aller Welt haben sich verpflichtet, ihren Energieverbrauch drastisch zu senken. Wie dies geschehen soll, ist bislang jedoch eine offene Frage. Vor diesem Hintergrund untersuchen die Autoren in einer Meta-Analyse, welche Potenziale verhaltensökonomische Interventionen haben, den Energiev...
Technical Report
Full-text available
Operational since 1998, the Konkan Railway is one of the biggest railway construction endeavour in independent India, traversing over 760 km along the Konkan region of Maharashtra, Goa and Karnataka – a hitherto backward region, characterized by out-migration for employment. The region is also known to be ecologically sensitive, which is why the ra...
Article
Free technology distribution can be an effective development policy instrument if market‐driven adoption is socially inefficient and hampered by affordability constraints. Yet, policy makers often oppose free distribution, arguing that reference dependence lowers the willingness to pay (WTP) and thus hinders market potentials in the long run. For i...
Article
Full-text available
Market-based reforms have been promoted over the past decades to improve the performance of the power sector. This systematic review assesses the effect of market-based reforms in developing countries on intermediate outcomes like technical efficiency and the resulting impacts on electricity access. Using a pool of 70 well-designed qualitative and...
Article
Infrastructure is a key area of public investment and development cooperation, and can be seen as a critical enabler of trade and integration. Stakeholders increasingly demand evidence on the effectiveness of investments in infrastructure such as railways, in part because these investments typically lock in development patterns for decades. In this...
Article
Off-grid solar electric power is a promising technology for remote regions in rural Africa where expansion of the electricity grids is prohibitively expensive. Using household data from a target region of an off-grid solar promotion program in the Kénédougou province in Burkina Faso, this paper explores the role of quality-verified branded solar ho...
Article
Full-text available
People without electricity access, numbering today more than 500 million in rural Africa alone, have been using dim and sooty kerosene lamps and candles for their lighting purposes for decades. In the present paper, current lighting usage patterns are systematically assessed using detailed new survey data from seven countries across Sub-Saharan Afr...
Article
Free distribution of a technology can be an effective development policy instrument if its adoption is socially inefficient and hampered by affordability constraints. Improved cookstoves may be such a case: they generate high environmental and public health returns, but adoption is generally low. Based on a randomized controlled trial in rural Sene...
Article
Around 3 billion people in developing countries rely on woodfuels for their daily cookingneeds with profound negative implications for their workload, health, and budget as wellas the environment. Improved cooking stove (ICS) technologies appear to be an obvioussolution in many cases. Indeed we find that users of a very simple ICS in urban BurkinaF...
Article
Today, almost 3 billion people in developing countries rely on biomass as primary cooking fuel, withprofound negative implications for their well-being. Improved biomass cooking stoves are alleged tocounteract these adverse effects. This paper evaluates take-up and impacts of low-cost improved stovesthrough a randomized controlled trial. The random...
Article
Full-text available
Non-electrified people in Africa, still more than 500 million today, have been using kerosene and candles for their lighting purposes for decades. The lighting quality of these sources is low and in particular kerosene usage is associated with harmful soot emissions. Alleviating this grievance has always been a major goal of electrification program...
Article
Around 3 billion people in developing countries rely on woodfuels for their daily cooking needs with profound negative implications for their workload, health, and budget as well as the environment. Improved cookstove (ICS) technologies in many cases appear to be an obvious solution. Despite continuous efforts of the international community to diss...
Article
Full-text available
With the ‘Sustainable Energy for All’ initiative led by the UN and World Bank, the provision of access to modern energy has recently been brought to the top of the international development agenda. However, there is yet little guidance on how to measure modern energy access or its deprivation, energy poverty. This paper discusses fi ve energy pover...
Article
Full-text available
With 2.7 billion people relying on woodfuel for cooking in developing countries, the dissemination of improved cooking stoves (ICSs) is frequently considered an effective instrument to combat deforestation, particularly in arid countries. This paper evaluates the impacts of an ICS dissemination project in urban Senegal on charcoal consumption, usin...
Article
Providing access to electricity is widely considered a precondition for socio-economic improvement in rural areas of developing countries. While electrification interventions are often expected to reduce poverty through their application in income generating purposes (business), the reality of rural usage patterns suggests a different actuality, wi...
Article
Full-text available
Today more than 2.7 billion people rely on biomass as their primary cooking fuel, with profound implications for the environment and people’s well-being. Wood provision is often time-consuming and the emitted smoke has severe health effects – both burdens that afflict women in particular. The dissemination of Improved Cooking Stoves (ICS) is freque...
Article
There is a consensus in the international community that rural electrification and, in particular, the productive use of electricity contributes to poverty alleviation. At the same time, efforts to evaluate the impacts of development projects have increased substantially. This paper provides a hands-on guide for designing evaluation studies regardi...
Article
Full-text available
Rural electrification is believed to contribute to the achievement of the MDG. In this paper, we investigate electrification impacts on different indicators. We use household data that we collected in Rwanda in villages with and without electricity access. We account for self-selection and regional differences by using households from the electrifi...
Article
Full-text available
There is a consensus in the international community that rural electrification and, in particular, the productive use of electricity contributes to poverty alleviation. At the same time, efforts to evaluate the impacts of development projects have increased substantially. This paper provides a hands-on guide for designing evaluation studies regardi...
Article
Full-text available
This baseline report is part of an evaluation commissioned by the Policy and Operations Evaluation Department (IOB) of the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It belongs to a series of impact evaluations of renewable energy and development programmes supported by the Netherlands, with a focus on the medium and long term effects of these progra...
Article
Rural electrification is believed to contribute to the achievement of the MDG. In this paper, we investigate electrification impacts on different indicators. We use household data that we collected in Rwanda in villages with and without electricity access. We account for self-selection and regional differences by using households from the electrifi...
Article
Full-text available
Rural electrification is believed to contribute to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) via various channels. In this paper, we investigate the impacts of electrification on the household’s lighting usage, home studying, energy expenditures and income. We use household data that we collected in rural Rwanda in villages with an...
Article
Full-text available
In various studies RWI analyzes the impacts on poverty of German development cooperation in the energy sector. The present report describes both energy usage and socio-economic conditions within two regions of Mozambique, in which electrification measures are conducted by the German Technical Cooperation (GTZ), a grid densification and a piko hydro...
Article
Full-text available
Diese Baseline-Studie porträtiert die von der Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) in Ruanda durchgeführte Elektrifizierungsmaßnahme „PSP Hydro“ und stellt umfassend die sozio-ökonomischen Bedingungen in der Projektregion vor Beginn der Intervention dar. Die erhobenen Daten dienen dem Zweck einer späteren Ex-post-Wirkungsevaluierung die...

Network

Cited By