Electricity (in)efficiency in transition economies: Evidence from a firm's survey

The Impact of Special Economic Zones on Electricity Intensity of Firms

“…the pollution intensity of Eastern European exports, potentially via firms' ability to upgrade their technology. Using firm level data for Central European and Central Asian countries, Bagayev and Najman (2012) similarly find that country financial development has a significant effect on firmlevel energy intensity. Trianni and Cagno (2012) find similar effects for Italy while Fafchamps and Schundeln (2013) do so for Morocco.…”

“…4 Although the bulk of the research uses the standardised version of these surveys, we instead use the more recent unstandardised versions as they contain information on whether or not firms are in SEZs. 5 In some countries, surveys were conducted twice; in these cases we kept the survey with the greatest number of observations. Note that since there is no indication whether a firm was surveyed twice when multiple surveys exist, we cannot use a panel data approach, making our data cross-sectional.…”

“…10 In addition, we use employment separately as a proxy of firm size. We also have information the age of the firm and a set of dummy variables indicating when a firm is foreign-owned, multi-product, possesses 5 Some of these surveys only ask whether or not a firm is in an SEZ whereas others distinguish between export processing zones and industrial parks. We do not make use of this distinction as the difference is not obviously comparable across surveys and it would preclude including some countries where the survey does not distinguish between the two.…”