Energy price reform in Saudi Arabia: Modeling the economic and environmental impacts and understanding the demand response

Saudi Arabia has regulated domestic energy prices for decades, setting them below international market levels. Energy subsidies in Saudi Arabia are generally implicit because they lead to foregone revenues for the government. Low energy prices also encourage rapid energy demand growth and wasteful consumption, while limiting incentives to invest in energy efficiency. Saudi Arabia recently started to reform energy prices, leading to large increases in gasoline and residential electricity prices in 2018. To measure the economic and environmental impacts of energy price reform, we econometrically model gasoline and residential electricity demand using Harvey's (1990) Structural Time Series Model. Our estimated equations reveal that gasoline demand and residential electricity demand in Saudi Arabia are strongly price and income inelastic, despite the major reforms that were recently implemented. Our welfare analysis also shows that the energy price reforms in 2018 in gasoline and residential electricity respectively delivered welfare gains of 8.8 and 3.8 billion SAR annually (2.3 and 1.0 billion US$). Additionally, our decomposition analysis reveals that these energy price reforms were the largest contributors to the observed decreases in gasoline and residential electricity consumption in 2018.