Long-term Gains from Electrification in Rural India

By Dominique van de Walle, M. Ravallion, V. Mendiratta, Gayatri Koolwal. 2015

141 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We know surprisingly little about the long-run impacts of household electrification. This paper studies the impacts on consumption in rural India over a 17-year period, allowing for both internal and external (village-level) effects. Under our identifying assumptions, electrification brought significant consumption gains for households who acquired electricity for their own use. We also find evidence of a dynamic effect of village connectivity for households without electricity themselves. This is suggestive of an external effect, which also comes with a shift in consumption spending suggestive of status concerns among those still without electricity. Labor earnings were an important channel of impact. This was mainly through extra work by men. There was no effect on average wage rates.

Subfields: Business and International Management, Pollution, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4a2a8bf28012a87a309ed327c83cab42457ca072

How researchers see this paper

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In Pollution

1. S. Pareglio
2. Massimo Tavoni
3. Jacopo Bonan
4. Nadia S. Ouedraogo

In Safety Research

1. S. Pareglio
2. M. N. Matinga
3. Tanja Winther
4. Massimo Tavoni
5. Jacopo Bonan
6. Karina Standal
7. Kirsten Ulsrud

Citations in the corpus

• A First Step Up the Energy Ladder? Low Cost Solar Kits and Household's Welfare in Rural Rwanda (2016, unknown): “Van de Walle et al. (2016) for instance find that in rural India electrification”
• Does Household Electrification Supercharge Economic Development? (2019, unknown): “…nearest grid infrastructure, assuming that proximity to existing infrastructure is correlated with the cost of grid extension but uncorrelated with current and future economic outcomes (for example, Khandker, Barnes, and Samad 2012; Van de Walle et al. 2017; Chakravorty, Emerick, and Ravago 2016).”
• Access to modern energy: a review of barriers, drivers and impacts (2016, background): “It has positive effects on the enrolment and years of schooling of Indian girls (van de Walle et al., 2015).”
• Women’s empowerment through electricity access: scoping study and proposal for a framework of analysis (2017, background): “For example, studies that have documented shifts in time use do not always provide data on fuel (UNDP/ESMAP 2004), whereas studies that have examined fuel and/or cooking technology (Van de Walle et al. 2015; 28 Dinkelman 2011) do not include data on time use.”