El Salvador - Rural Electrification

The impact evaluation seeks to determine the impact of electrification on the cost of energy, energy consumption, time allocation, and household income. Because the new electric lines will come from the existing power grid, an experimental design is not feasible for the overall impact evaluation. Therefore, the evaluators will combine two parallel approaches. The first approach to evaluate the overall impact of the project will use a non-experimental design taking advantage of the timeline of the rollout of the project and using propensity score matching to identify treatment (households that receive the new electrical service) and control groups (households that do not receive new service). Using specialized household surveys for both the household head and his/her spouse and with an intra-household time allocation module, the evaluators will estimate the differences in energy consumption, household income, and time use between the treatment and control groups. A difference-in-difference estimation method will control for changes in non-observable variables, and instrumental variables estimation will control for any remaining potential sources of selection bias.

The second approach will focus on the first set of households to be connected to the electricity grid, i.e. a subsample of towns and households from the full sample being evaluated. From this sub-sample of households we will select randomly an additional control and treatment group. The treatment group will be randomly assigned vouchers for 20% and 50% of the cost of the installation of the connection that the households/business will need to pay in order access the electricity once the cable reaches their household/business (the average cost is around 120 US$). Vouchers will be assigned randomly to 400 eligible survey respondents. The vouchers would not only encourage a sufficient level of demand for electricity access in the early stages of intervention, but would also provide a basis for experimental evaluation of accessibility to electricity by serving as an instrumental variable for electricity access. The randomly selected control towns and households will serve as an appropriate control group given that they will receive no vouchers.

Data and Resources

Field Value
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modified 2017-04-26
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Groups
  • AmeriGEOSS
  • National Provider
  • North America
Tags
  • amerigeo
  • amerigeoss
  • ckan
  • el-salvador
  • energy
  • geo
  • geoss
  • impact-evaluation
  • national
  • north-america
  • propensity-score-matching
  • random-assignment
  • united-states
  • vouchers
isopen False
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license_title other-license-specified
maintainer Monitoring & Evaluation Division of the Millennium Challenge Corporation
maintainer_email impact-eval@mcc.gov
metadata_created 2025-11-20T04:39:05.781847
metadata_modified 2025-11-20T04:39:05.781852
notes The impact evaluation seeks to determine the impact of electrification on the cost of energy, energy consumption, time allocation, and household income. Because the new electric lines will come from the existing power grid, an experimental design is not feasible for the overall impact evaluation. Therefore, the evaluators will combine two parallel approaches. The first approach to evaluate the overall impact of the project will use a non-experimental design taking advantage of the timeline of the rollout of the project and using propensity score matching to identify treatment (households that receive the new electrical service) and control groups (households that do not receive new service). Using specialized household surveys for both the household head and his/her spouse and with an intra-household time allocation module, the evaluators will estimate the differences in energy consumption, household income, and time use between the treatment and control groups. A difference-in-difference estimation method will control for changes in non-observable variables, and instrumental variables estimation will control for any remaining potential sources of selection bias. The second approach will focus on the first set of households to be connected to the electricity grid, i.e. a subsample of towns and households from the full sample being evaluated. From this sub-sample of households we will select randomly an additional control and treatment group. The treatment group will be randomly assigned vouchers for 20% and 50% of the cost of the installation of the connection that the households/business will need to pay in order access the electricity once the cable reaches their household/business (the average cost is around 120 US$). Vouchers will be assigned randomly to 400 eligible survey respondents. The vouchers would not only encourage a sufficient level of demand for electricity access in the early stages of intervention, but would also provide a basis for experimental evaluation of accessibility to electricity by serving as an instrumental variable for electricity access. The randomly selected control towns and households will serve as an appropriate control group given that they will receive no vouchers.
num_resources 7
num_tags 14
title El Salvador - Rural Electrification