This paper estimates the income and price elasticities of the residential electricity demand for twelve major European countries using annual time series from 1975 to 2018. In the modelling exercise we adopt a novel econometric approach that features automatic model selection, saturation methods for detecting outliers and structural breaks, and the automatic model selection algorithm Autometrics. The selected specification for each country is an error correction model, from which it emerges a cointegrating relationship between electricity consumption, income, electricity price and climate variables, once that outliers and breaks are accounted for. The empirical results show that the estimated long-run income elasticities are less than one for all countries, and that the long-run price elasticities are in all cases less than one in absolute value. These results suggest that for European countries electricity is a normal good and that demand is price inelastic.

本文使用 1975 年至 2018 年的年度时间序列估计了 12 个欧洲主要国家住宅电力需求的收入和价格弹性。中断，以及自动模型选择算法 Autometrics。为每个国家选择的规范是一个误差校正模型，一旦考虑到异常值和中断，它就会从中出现电力消耗、收入、电价和气候变量之间的协整关系。实证结果表明，估计所有国家的长期收入弹性都小于 1，长期价格弹性的绝对值在所有情况下都小于 1。