Foresighted Demand Side Management

We consider a smart grid with an independent system operator (ISO), and distributed aggregators who have energy storage and purchase energy from the ISO to serve its customers. All the entities in the system are foresighted: each aggregator seeks to minimize its own long-term payments for energy purchase and operational costs of energy storage by deciding how much energy to buy from the ISO, and the ISO seeks to minimize the long-term total cost of the system (e.g. energy generation costs and the aggregators' costs) by dispatching the energy production among the generators. The decision making of the entities is complicated for two reasons. First, the information is decentralized: the ISO does not know the aggregators' states (i.e. their energy consumption requests from customers and the amount of energy in their storage), and each aggregator does not know the other aggregators' states or the ISO's state (i.e. the energy generation costs and the status of the transmission lines). Second, the coupling among the aggregators is unknown to them. Specifically, each aggregator's energy purchase affects the price, and hence the payments of the other aggregators. However, none of them knows how its decision influences the price because the price is determined by the ISO based on its state. We propose a design framework in which the ISO provides each aggregator with a conjectured future price, and each aggregator distributively minimizes its own long-term cost based on its conjectured price as well as its local information. The proposed framework can achieve the social optimum despite being decentralized and involving complex coupling among the various entities

Cooperatives for demand side management

We propose a new scheme for efficient demand side management for the Smart Grid. Specifically, we envisage and promote the formation of cooperatives of medium-large consumers and equip them (via our proposed mechanisms) with the capability of regularly participating in the existing electricity markets by providing electricity demand reduction services to the Grid. Based on mechanism design principles, we develop a model for such cooperatives by designing methods for estimating suitable reduction amounts, placing bids in the market and redistributing the obtained revenue amongst the member agents. Our mechanism is such that the member agents have no incentive to show artificial reductions with the aim of increasing their revenue

The Demand Side of Social Protection

In fragile states, social protection programmes are often a kaleidoscope of projects financed and implemented by a variety of donors, government agencies and NGOs. Such an environment does not foster a strong sense of ownership by beneficiaries, which weakens the likelihood of sustainability in the absence of donor interest or government commitment. Loosening demand-side constraints may provide incentive to sustain social progress, but it is unclear what political or social structures can effectively facilitate voice in fragile states. Cambodia.s unusual social protection trajectory offers some insight by presenting an example where labour rights has made substantial progress while all other protections lag. We assess whether the changed external environment might facilitate activism in other areas of social protection. Our analysis suggests that using an island of excellence to build institutions that open political space for activism can be a successful strategy in states where governments are unable or unwilling to provide comprehensive social protection systems.fragile states, Asia, social protection, Cambodia, social movements, labour standards

Learning from Decentralised Policy: The Demand Side

A popular argument about economic policy under uncertainty states that decentralisation offers the possibility to learn from local or regional policy experiments. We argue that such learning processes are not trivial and do not occur frictionlessly: Voters have an inherent tendency to retain a given stock of policy-related knowledge which was costly to accumulate, so that yardstick competition is improbable to function well particularly for complex issues if representatives' actions are tightly controlled by the electorate. Decentralisation provides improved learning processes compared to unitary systems, but the results we can expect are far from the ideal mechanisms of producing and utilising knowledge often described in the literature.This paper looks at competition in the telecommunication industry.Policy decentralisation, fiscal competition, model uncertainty, collective learning

Employment of women and demand-side forces

Using the 1964–95 March Current Population Surveys and the 1940–90 Census, this paper examines the relationship between female employment growth and changes in labor demand. Specifically, the authors examine whether industrial change and changes in labor demand can account for both the acceleration and deceleration of female employment growth across the decades as well as the pattern of biased growth in favor of more skilled women. They find that labor demand proxies are successful in accounting for the pattern of biased growth but are less successful in accounting for the overall acceleration of female employment, particularly in the 1970s.Labor supply ; Women - Employment

Demand-side Issues of the Service Economy

Cet article défend la pertinence d'une approche par la demande du développement d'une économie de services. Il traite d'abord des possibilités d'un régime de croissance basé sur les services. Si l'aspect généralement discuté concerne la part croissante des services dans les dépenses de consommation, tout aussi important est le fait que les produits - biens et services - intègrent désormais souvent une dimension de service au client. L'article s'intéresse aux coûts induits par de telles stratégies de création de valeur pour le client : ils supposent l'existence d'un pouvoir d'achat susceptibles de valider ces dépenses.Services; croissance; pouvoir d'achat; demande

Using agriculture for development: Supply- and demand-side approaches

For most poor countries of today, using agriculture for development is widely recognized as a promising strategy. Yet, in these countries, investment in agriculture has mostly been lagging relative to international norms and recommendations. Current wisdom on how to use agriculture for development is that it requires asset building for smallholder farmers, productivity growth in staple foods, an agricultural transformation (diversification of farming systems toward high value crops), and a rural transformation (value addition through rural non-farm activities linked to agriculture). This sequence has too often been hampered by extensive market and government failures. We outline a theory of change where the removal of market and government failures to use this Agriculture for Development strategy can be addressed through two contrasted and complementary approaches. One is from the “supply-side” where public and social agents (governments, international and bilateral development agencies, NGOs, donors) intervene to help farmers overcome the major constraints to adoption: liquidity, risk, information, and access to markets. The other is from the “demand-side” where private agents (entrepreneurs, producer organizations) create incentives for smallholder farmers to modernize through contracting and vertical coordination in value chains. We review the extensive literature that has explored ways of using Agriculture for Development through these two approaches. We conclude by noting that the supply-side approach has benefited from extensive research but met with limited success. The demand-side approach has promise, but received insufficient attention and is in need of additional rigorous research which we outline