The Electricity Consumption in a Rentier State: Do Institutions Matter?

The core focus of this paper is to assess the relationship between the electricity consumption and institutions within rentierism phenomenon by incorporating economic growth, urbanization, trade openness and foreign direct investment in the case of Algeria. To this end, we have applied the ARDL bounds testing approach to cointegration and innovative accounting approach (variance decomposition and impulse response methods) over the period of 1971-2012. Our empirical results show that these variables are cointegrated in the long-run. We find that institutions play an important role to explain this cointegration. The response of electricity demand is increasingly negative due to the one standard deviation shock in institutions. This highlights an insightful evidence, providing that the poor governance drawbacks in a rentier state may affect directly electricity consumption or indirectly via urbanization and foreign direct investment. The contribution of economic growth to electricity consumption appears minor (the conservation hypothesis is limitedly supported), while that of trade openness seems insignificant.