دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی برق سریع و کیفیت خدمات: شواهد از هندوستان روستایی - الزویر 2018

ABSTRACT

Rural electrification has progressed unevenly across the world since 1945, with some rural communities gaining access to power decades earlier than others. We examine the association between early electrification and the quality of electricity service to households, testing the hypothesis that aging infrastructure compromises the quality of electricity service. Using the 2014–2015 ACCESS survey from rural India, we find that early electrification is associated with improvements in the quality of electricity service, even controlling for village size and distance to nearest town. A possible explanation for the finding is that early electrification generates economic gains that allow the rural community to invest in maintenance and upgrades.

Conclusion

Rural electrification has expanded only slowly over time, with countries such as India still far from the goal after seven decades of programs and policies. One important consequence of this slow progress is that different rural communities have been electrified at very different times. Among the electrified villages in the ACCESS sample, for example, some villages were electrified as early as in 1956 while others had been electrified only months before the survey, in the fall of 2014. Here we have assessed the association between early electrification and the quality of electricity service. We have found that villages electrified early still enjoy better quality of service than those electrified recently, a result that holds after controlling for confounders such as village size and distance to nearest town. Our findings suggest that simply electrifying villages is insufficient for providing quality electrical service. Although increasing the electrification rate is important, greater attention needs to be paid to ensuring that newly electrified villages benefit from high quality service. We show that despite greater electrification rates in India, a gap still exists between villages that have been electrified recently and those electrified in the past. To close this gaps, policymakers should strive to provide newly electrified villages with the infrastructure necessary to match the quality of service present in villages electrified in the past.