Which cooking and heating fuels are more likely to be used in energy-poor households? Exploring energy and fuel poverty in Argentina

Abstract

Energy poverty in emerging countries has mainly been analysed in the literature as a problem of energy supply accessibility. However, this analysis is too simple, as in many of these countries there can be a problem of energy accessibility that is not necessarily linked to an insufficiency of energy supply but is related to the use of certain types of fuels or facilities to meet the energy needs of the household. Moreover, what can explain the choice of these fuels can also be an affordability energy problem, and this has been scarcely treated on energy poverty papers focused on developing countries. This work aims to shed light on this literature, analysing both the affordability and the accessibility energy problem of Argentine households. To do so, we use micro-data from an expenditure-survey. First, we measure the energy affordability problem by calculating the Boardman indicator. Second, we estimate two logit models to show how likely it is that the affordability energy problem explains the choice of facilities for cooking and heating that can indicate an energy accessibility problem. Third, to refine the results of our estimations, we calculate the ROC curves to measure the levels in which energy-poor and non-energy-poor household are better identified than with the standard identification of logit models. The results show that it is more probable that households characterized by monetary energy poverty use facilities that indicate an energy accessibility problem than households that are not energy poor.