Autarky

Summary

Autarky is the characteristic of self-sufficiency, usually applied to societies, communities, states, and their economic systems. Autarky as an ideology or economic approach has been attempted by a range of political ideologies and movements, like African socialism, mutualism, war communism, communalism, swadeshi, syndicalism (especially anarcho-syndicalism), and left-wing populism, generally in an effort to build alternative economic structures or to control resources against structures a particular movement views as hostile. Conservative, centrist and nationalist movements have also adopted autarky to develop a particular industry, to gain independence from other national entities or to preserve part of an existing social order. Proponents of autarky have argued for national self-sufficiency to reduce foreign economic, political and cultural influences, as well as to promote international peace. Economists are generally supportive of free trade. There is a broad consensus among eco

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autarky

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Electricity supply in West Africa: between bilateral agreements and a single regional market

It is necessary to specify that this study is an academic work carried out by a student as part of his master's project. The hypotheses and reasoning made by the student are at the origin of the results obtained. Energy has a crucial role in the economic development of a nation or region. The states of ECOWAS, have decided to come together to unite for this challenge and offer quality services to the population. WAPP, a specialized institution, decides to interconnect networks in order to pool the resources of the electricity market and offers quality access at a competitive price to the population. It is therefore necessary to strengthen production, distribution and transmission capacities to ensure the coordination of electricity exchanges between member countries. This study initially consisted in setting up a methodology explaining the progressive approaches that are applied throughout the project. The strategies for expanding the fleet are each analysed: the self-sufficiency strategy including existing imports and bilateral agreements, the strategy applied by WAPP along with variants involving the share of local production for importing countries. The expansion analysis is done with the support of the PlanElec software. An economic and technical comparison is then made on these two strategies, based on the different costs, the different investments, the installed powers by type and the energy produced. It can be seen that the more the share of local production increases for importing countries, the more interesting the weighted cost of production becomes. But this has a limit demonstrated by the autarkic strategy. Indeed, the countries considered as importers use imports and their weighted cost of production is lower than with a local production share imposed. From a global economic point of view, it is more interesting to rely on the major energy powers of the sub-region. With this study, it has been shown that it is more interesting for countries to turn to an open market policy, dependent on the major powers of the region, although politically no country wishes to be totally dependent on another.

2019

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To improve peoples’ living conditions in West African countries national governments have to considerably reinforce the electricity supply infrastructures. Rehabilitation of the existing installations and construction of new power generation facilities and transmission lines require substantial resources which are tremendously difficult to raise due to the region's specific economical and political conditions. This paper examines the long-term prospects for integrated development of the regional electricity industry and evaluates its advantages by using PLANELEC-Pro, a “bottom-up” electricity system expansion planning optimisation model. The evolution of regional electricity market is analysed on the basis of two strategies. The “autarkical” strategy consists in adequate expansion of national power generation systems and the exchanges of electricity between the countries in sub-zones. Another approach referred to as “integration” strategy is recommended in this article. It leads to fast retirement of the obsolete power plants and the integration of new investment projects at the level of whole West African sub-region. The main finding is that the regional integration strategy is capable to bring about additional benefits in terms of reduced capital expenditures, lower electricity supply cost and the enhanced system's reliability compared to the autarkical strategy.

2007

Electricity supply in West Africa: between bilateral agreements and a single regional market

2019