Demand For Electricity In Lebanon

Abstract

This paper estimates the demand for electricity in Lebanon by employing three modeling techniques namely OLS, ARIMA and exponential smoothing for the time span January 1995 to December 2005. In- sample forecasts reveal that the forecasts made by ARIMA (0,1,3) (1,0,0)12 is superior in terms of lowest RMSE, MSE and MAPE criteria, followed by exponential smoothing and OLS. Therefore, the planners in Lebanon could utilize linear univariate time-series models for forecasting future demand of electricity until detailed data on various socio-economic variables are available, which, in the future, may result in other modeling techniques being superior to estimate the demand for electricity in the country.