Research purpose is identification of sales problems of energy saving actions for residential sector of economy, including with use of the power service contract. The choice of the object of the study is related to the general issues on energy saving of residential facilities and increasing the number of unresolved problems. Unfortunately, the efficiency of energy consumption of housing stock is extremely low that directly leads to an increase in citizens' payments for public utilities (housing and communal services). There are many problems associated with the aging of fixed assets: it becomes especially evident in winter seasons. The level of quality of delivery, distribution and consumption of expensive heat resources that has the greatest impact on a residence comfort and sometimes human life and health, is very low. Our population faces to year overheating or freezing, to leakages through worn pipes and the subsequent disconnection of water and heat. Despite the public declaration of the of the active processes of modernization of the housing municipal economy in the Russian Federation, the implementation of the necessary energy-saving elements in the housing sector is evolving very slowly. The article presents conceptual positions, which will bring the issues related to energy saving and efficiency to a new level.

This paper applies an ordered discrete choice framework to model fuel choices and patterns of cooking fuel use in urban Indian households. The choices considered are for three main cooking fuels: firewood, kerosene, and LPG (liquid petroleum gas). The models, estimated using a large microeconomic dataset, show a reasonably good performance in the prediction of households’ primary and secondary fuel choices. This suggests that ordered models can be used to analyze multiple fuel use patterns in the Indian context. The results show that lack of sufficient income is one of the main factors that retard households from using cleaner fuels, which usually also require the purchase of relatively expensive equipments. The results also indicate that households are sensitive to LPG prices. In addition to income and price, several socio-demographic factors such as education and sex of the head of the household are also found to be important in determining household fuel choice.

This paper applies a number of stochastic cost frontier models to a panel data set and compares their ability to distinguish unobserved heterogeneity from inefficiency variation among firms. The main focus is on Greene's 2005 panel data model that incorporates firm-specific effects in a stochastic frontier framework. In cases where the unobserved heterogeneity is correlated with explanatory variables, while the random effects estimators can be biased the fixed effects model may overestimate inefficiency. In line with Mundlak, a simple method is proposed to include such correlations in random effects specification. The sample includes 36 Swiss nursing homes operating from 1993 to 2001. The results suggest that the proposed specification can avoid the inconsistency problem while keeping the inefficiency estimates unaffected.

This paper explores the economies of scale and scope in the electricity, gas and water utilities. These issues have a crucial importance in the actual policy debates about unbundling the integrated utilities into separate entities, a policy which has often been supported by the ongoing reforms in the deregulation of network industries. This paper argues that the potential improvements in efficiency through unbundling should be assessed against the loss of scope economies. Several econometric specifications including a random-coefficient model are used to estimate a cost function for a sample of utilities distributing electricity, gas and/or water to the Swiss population. The estimates of scale and scope economies are compared across different models and the effect of heterogeneity among companies are explored. While indicating considerable scope and scale economies overall, the results suggest a significant variation in scope economies across companies due to unobserved heterogeneity.JEL Classification: C33, D24, L11, L25, L94, L95

No abstract