Darandary, Abdulelah

12 January 2025

This paper revisits the empirical evidence on the income elasticity of energy demand by investigating whether it varies with the level of economic development. Our analysis, based on a sample of 111 countries spanning three decades, reveals that the elasticity is not constant a... 

24 June 2024

There is a consensus in the literature regarding the significant role of behavioral change in reducing the level of residential energy consumption. However, there is an ongoing debate concerning the most effective mechanisms and instruments with which to promote energy-efficient acti...

12 May 2024

Using a sample of 94 countries, we analyze the contribution of energy to cross-country economic growth and convergence since 1980. By extending the traditional frontier approach to include energy as an additional factor of production, we decompose economic growth into components attr...

11 December 2023

Saudi Vision 2030 (SV2030), the masterplan for the socioeconomic development of the Kingdom, places considerable emphasis on the development of the private sector in the diversification of the economy. This plan aims to have the private sector account for 65% of the total GDP of the ...

25 June 2023

One of the key benefits of understanding regional electricity consumption and its response to policy changes is enhancing the decision-making process. In Saudi Arabia, energy policies are set at the national level, and assessing their impacts at the regional level provides valuable i...

06 June 2023

As a party to the Paris Agreement, which aims to limit the global average temperature rise to below 2 degrees and keep it as close as possible to 1.5 degrees Celsius, Saudi Arabia has submitted its nationally determined contribution (NDC). NDCs are essentially climate action plans th...

10 May 2023

croeconomic and sectoral assessment of the energy price reform (EPR) can provide policymakers with useful insights regarding price deregulation options. A key feature of this research that differentiates it from many other studies is its modeling framework. The framework first estima...

05 March 2023

Evaluating the potential outcomes of energy price reforms is essential for policymakers to assess their effectiveness. In 2016 and 2018, the Saudi government enacted two waves of energy price reforms to curb historically fast-growing electricity demand. We quantify the effects...  

13 January 2022

The objective of this study is to investigate Saudi Arabia’s industrial electricity consumption at the regional level. We apply structural time series modeling to annual data over the period of 1990 to 2019. In addition to estimating the size and significance of the price and income ...

14 April 2021

The last decade has brought a row of substantial changes that have profound implications for the hydrocarbon resource-rich economies. The general answer to a changing environment is: Adapt! From the macroeconomic perspective, this means diversifying the economy to broaden the income ...

13 September 2020

Aggregate residential electricity consumption in Saudi Arabia has increased rapidly over the past several decades, largely due to population increases and fast economic growth (SAMA 2019). The growth in electricity consumption has been driven, among other factors, by government-admin...

27 April 2025

Saudi Arabia has committed to net-zero (NZ) greenhouse gas emissions by 2060. This requires substantial emission reductions across key sectors, including the power generation sector. We assess the technological options, critical mineral requirements, renewable energy resource require...

21 August 2025

This study quantifies the impact of a warming climate on residential cooling demand in Saudi Arabia, examining four regions through 2060. Utilizing region-specific electricity demand models and IPCC temperature pathways, we find that a 1°C increase in average temperature could raise e...

02 December 2024

Analyzing the distribution of electricity consumption provides a clearer picture of distinct household segments and their behaviors. This approach allows us to identify clusters of low, moderate, and high consumers, offering insight into usage patterns. Such granularity can guide tar...

14 December 2023

• Rise in Other Quasi-Money Deposits: The paper also examines the implications of a record-high in other quasi-money deposits, signifying an increased interest in alternative ways to save and invest money. This trend may be a response to changing economic conditions, attractive intere...

05 September 2023

These releases have extended the number of sectors representing the Saudi Arabian economy to 20 from the 13 sectors typically reported in GDP official reports. This disaggregation of sectors in the input-output table is valuable for analyzing new sector developments and targeted sect...

05 September 2023

Our aggregate real energy index is constructed in two steps. First, sectoral energy prices are obtained from Hasanov et al (2020). Second, the index is constructed by calculating a weighted average of these sectoral energy prices, in which the weight for each sector is its contributi...

19 July 2023

This data insight calculates the humidity-adjusted Cooling and Heating Degree Days for Saudi Arabia. This dataset can be used by researchers who model residential electricity demand, energy efficiency studies, and policymakers to base their potential policy scenarios on weather condi...

08 July 2024

sidential energy consumption is responsible for significant global energy consumption and associated emissions. As a result, households are a prime focus for behavior-modifying interventions. Household energy conservation can be achieved through changes in consumption patterns and in...

11 December 2020

Diversification is important because it is associated with economic growth and reduced volatility. Export diversification is especially important for developing countries as a source of foreign exchange and imported know-how. We examine how export diversification is affected by trade...

05 May 2024

This commentary presents the findings of the annual Energy Statistics Survey by the General Authority for Statistics (GASTAT), an ongoing initiative since 2017 that is now in its fifth iteration, which covers 2022. The survey encompasses hundreds of responses from 45,420 households a...

25 March 2024

The revealed comparative advantage (RCA) is based on Ricardian trade theory, which postulates that trade flows between countries are determined by their relative productivity differences. The RCA index provides a general indication and a first approximation of a country’s competitive...

17 January 2024

The 44th International Association for Energy Economics (IAEE) conference was held in Riyadh, co-hosted by KAPSARC and the Saudi Association for Energy Economics (SAEE). It was the first IAEE conference in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. The main theme was “Pathways t...

23 December 2021

Electricity price reforms are generally regarded as a mechanism to reduce distortions in energy markets, improve energy efficiency, and increase government revenue. However, an additional co-benefit of such policy measures is lowering greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

05 June 2023

This paper utilizes a structural time series approach to model Saudi Arabia’s regional electricity demand, capturing undetected forces of variability in the data-generating process that include improvements in technology, energy-saving behavior, and other underlying trends tha...  

30 May 2022

It has been two years since the beginning of COVID-19, a one-of-a-kind crisis in recent history. The global economy was disrupted entirely in a few months and most economies faced shutdowns. While many disruptions can be explained, especially the economic disruptions, parts of the pu...

06 January 2021

Saudi Arabia is moving ahead with its diversification plan, Saudi Vision 2030, by adopting hydrogen. The Kingdom is keen to enable the circular carbon economy (CCE) by producing and utilizing clean hydrogen. On September 27, Saudi Aramco announced its first shipment of hydrogen from ...

26 July 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic and the efforts to combat it have led to major global disruptions. Policymakers are faced with a dilemma that is not easily resolved. On the one hand, they are striving to protect public health by containing the spread of the virus. On the other, they must ensur...

10 June 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has interrupted economic and social activity globally at an unprecedented pace. The international movement of goods has been limited to the necessary minimum, often solely for deliveries of protective and healthcare equipment. Many governments have imposed stric...

20 May 2020

In the last few months, the world has experienced the negative effects of COVID-19. The outbreak, which started as an epidemic concentrated in China, quickly spread to become a global pandemic. As of May 12, 2020, there have been over four million COVID-19 cases globally, and this nu...

15 December 2019

The government of Saudi Arabia has successfully reduced the country’s energy intensity, helped by its establishment of the Saudi Energy Efficiency Center (SEEC) and a series of energy price reforms (EPR) that began in 2016. However, how households have responded to the EPR is an impo...

28 July 2020

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region consists of a heterogeneous group of countries ranging from high-income countries in the Arabian Gulf to middle-income and least developed countries. A dominant concern in the MENA region is the high dependence on oil and gas among high-...

28 June 2020

Diversification is important because it is associated with economic growth and reduced volatility. Diversification of exports, which provide foreign exchange and enable imports of critical goods, services, and know-how, is crucial for developing countries. The question we address in ...

10 February 2020