Welfare impacts of rural electrification : a case study from Bangladesh
By Shahidur R. Khandker, D. Barnes, Hussain Samad. 2009
167 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Lack of access to electricity is one of the major impediments to growth and development of the rural economies in developing countries. That is why access to modern energy, in particular to electricity, has been one of the priority themes of the World Bank and other development organizations. Using a cross-sectional survey conducted in 2005 of some 20,000 households in rural Bangladesh, this paper studies the welfare impacts of households' grid connectivity. Based on rigorous econometric estimation techniques, this study finds that grid electrification has significant positive impacts on households' income, expenditure, and educational outcomes. For example, the gain in total income due to electrification can be as much as 30 percent and as low as 9 percent. Benefits go up steadily as household exposure to grid electrification (measured by duration) increases and eventually reach a plateau. This paper also finds that rich households benefit more from electrification than poor households. Finally, estimates also show that income benefits of electrification on an average exceed cost by a wide margin.
Subfields: Nutrition and Dietetics, Pollution, Safety Research
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5f4e0511d020f162e1d9aa4d5c2ebd8dcac69ba2
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Nutrition and Dietetics
In Pollution
- Alex Niez
- Jörg Peters
- Dominique van de Walle
- Lynn H. Kaack
- Gayatri Koolwal
- P. Jaramillo
- M. Ravallion
- Taha Selim Ustun
In Safety Research
- Dominique van de Walle
- Jörg Peters
- M. Ravallion
- Alex Niez
- Jochen Kluve
- Gayatri Koolwal
- Yoshua Bengio
- Alexandra Sasha Luccioni
Citations in the corpus
- Enabling private sector investment in microgrid-based rural electrification in developing countries: A review (2015, background): “Electricity access has been linked to many positive developmental and welfare benefits including greater economic opportunities and increased income, higher quality of life and access to information, improved health, and greater educational attainment [2–9].”
- The Economics of Renewable Energy Expansion in Rural Sub-Saharan Africa (2010, unknown): “One recent empirical study by Khandker et al. (2009) estimates income gains from electrification in rural Bangladesh between 9 percent and 30 percent.”
- Long-Term Impacts of Household Electrification in Rural India (2013, background): “Villages do not shift location in rural India, and even by 1999, power generating plants were often several hundred kilometers away from villages (see Table A1).”
- Long-term Gains from Electrification in Rural India (2015, background): “Khandker, Barnes, and Samad (2009) use household proximity to an electricity line.”
- Comparative Study on Rural Electrification Policies in Emerging Economies: Keys to successful policies (2010, background): “A 2009 case study of Bangladesh showed that the total income gain following electrification reached up to 30% (Khandker et al., 2009).”
- Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning (2019, background): “Improving clean energy access Improving access to clean electricity can address climate change while simultaneously improving social and economic development [142, 143].”
- Impacts of rural electrification in Rwanda (2011, background): “(2011) and Neelsen and Peters (2011) examine the usage of electricity and its impacts in micro-enterprises. Likewise, Rud (2010) and Dinkelman (2008) look more at the productive effects of electrification.”