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T he electric power industry has attracted great interest over the postwar period as its importance to national economies was growing. Changes in the cost structure and productivity of the sector were, and still are, expected to have considerable impacts on the rest of the economy because electricity is used as an intermediate input by virtually all other industries. As a consequence, a number of empirical studies were devoted to investigating the structure of the sector.'These studies provided us not only with rich information on technological change, returns to scale, the degree of substitution between factor inputs and the productivity growth of the industry but also and most importantly, supplied relatively accurate measures of productivity growth in the electric power industry and empirical evidence explaining the observed slowdown in productivity growth in the 1970s in the electric power sector per se and the economy …