Demand function for industrial electricity: Evidence from South Korean manufacturing sector

Abstract

Electricity is a crucial input to the industrial production of South Korea. Estimating the demand function for electricity in the manufacturing sector is an important task because electricity consumption in the manufacturing sector accounts for 56.3% of total electricity consumption in South Korea. Thus, this article tries to estimate the demand function for industrial electricity in the manufacturing sector of South Korea using cross-sectional data for analyzing the influence of manufacturing firms' characteristics. To this end, 946 observations collected from a nationwide survey of manufacturing firms in 2018 are used and analyzed. As a robust approach, the least absolute deviations estimation method is applied to obtaining the demand function. The results show that the price elasticity and the sales amount elasticity of the industrial electricity demand are estimated to be -0.9206 and 0.2568, respectively, which are statistically significant at the 1% level. Furthermore, the economic benefits of industrial electricity consumption are computed to be 1.46 times as great as the price of electricity. The results of this study can be utilized in policy planning, making, and evaluation.