Philipp is a KAPSARC former research fellow working on the economic and policy aspects of energy supply and trade. Before moving to Saudi Arabia, Philipp worked in the spheres of economics and finance in the private sector of Russia, the CIS countries and Eastern Europe, as well as in the government sector of the Russian Federation. His research focus and professional interests lie in the areas of international economic relations, regional and country studies and policy analysis. Philipp’s current projects at KAPSARC include evaluating the effect of preferential trade agreements on energy flows, analysis of the OPEC energy policy and deriving insights related to China’s energy policy and its impact on the global markets through modelling energy supply sectors.
This paper identifies key determinants that appear to shape OPEC’s quota strategy and implementation. Using econometric estimations, it examines the factors that seem to most influence members’ adherence to their production commitments in the short term and what drives the organization’s quota decisions and level of compliance in the longer term.
July 19, 2018
Petrochemical products, particularly plastics, contribute to a significant share of expanding and increasingly diverse trade flows between the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries and China. The petrochemical sector could benefit from a preferential bilateral trade regime between China and the GCC, but has been a bone of contention in the GCC-China Free Trade Agreement (FTA) negotiation process. This study applies a dual-stage model of import demand functions to estimate the impact of trade liberalization scenarios, within an FTA framework, on China’s imports of major plastics from the GCC and the rest of the world. It assesses the implications of these scenarios for all parties.
June 4, 2018
Despite significant progress made by China in liberalizing its natural gas market, certain key areas such as market access and pricing mechanisms remain heavily monopolized or controlled by the government. To assess how such distortions impact the market, we developed a Mixed Complementarity Problem model of China’s natural gas supply industry, calibrated to 2015 data.
May 24, 2018
During periods of supply abundance that lead to lower prices, commodity exporters strive to secure their market share with major importing economies. This paper seeks to cast light on what drives an exporter’s share of Chinese imports of oil, gas and coal – and we find that the strategy behind achieving this goal need not rely on pricing policies alone. China has been promoting a trade agenda that seeks to strengthen economic ties in the Asia-Pacific region and has been extending negotiations aimed at developing relationships worldwide. The country is a major energy import powerhouse; its trade deals have significant impact on the international energy trade and global energy markets. We explore the role of energy in China’s preferential trade agreements (PTAs) and extend the trade gravity model to disaggregated trade flows, estimating the impact these agreements have on Chinese energy imports.
April 16, 2017
When energy sectors transition from government-controlled to market-driven systems, the legacy regulatory instruments can create unintended market distortions and lead to higher costs. In China, the most notable regulatory throwback is ceilings on electricity prices that generators can charge utilities, which are specified by plant type and region. We built a mixed complementarity model calibrated to 2012 data to examine the impact of these price caps on the electricity and coal sectors.
September 29, 2016
China’s coal industry grew at unprecedented rates during the first decade of the 2000s in order to support equally unprecedented economic growth. In that type of environment, it is impossible for the capacities of every link in the supply chain to be correctly sized all the time. In order to understand the consequences of such mismatches, KAPSARC has developed a production and multi modal transshipment model of China’s domestic coal market, calibrated to 2011 data. This allows us to examine what the global and domestic consequences might have been had the bottlenecks not existed in 2011.
September 7, 2015
Government policy is a critical factor in the understanding of energy markets. Governments create constraints and incentives that drive behavior through policy. In turn, these behaviors have fundamental impacts on the functioning of markets. Despite the critical role of policy, it is rarely approached systematically from a research perspective. One of the first and most basic steps in a systematic approach is gaining a precise understanding of what policies exist, their intended outcomes, their geographical extent, duration, and expected evolution. A systematic understanding of policy, with this level of detail, would enable the research community to answer a variety of questions that, for now, are either over-simplified or ignored. Policy, on its surface, is also a very unstructured and qualitative undertaking. There may be quantitative components, but policies are usually framed in sentences requiring interpretation of their meaning. This makes it difficult to incorporate an understanding of policy into quantitative approaches, other than by making assumptions as to the effect of policy in framing a quantitative model. The KAPSARC Energy Policy Database (KEPD) is intended to address these two energy policy research limitations. The methodology described in this paper could be applied to any set of energy policies, though this becomes a large task very quickly.
January 6, 2015Energy Policy
2018Energy Economics
2016International Journal of Energy Security and Environmental Research
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