Energy access and living standards: some observations on recent trends

By Narasimha D. Rao, S. Pachauri. 2017

161 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A subset of Sustainable Development Goals pertains to improving people’s living standards at home. These include the provision of access to electricity, clean cooking energy, improved water and sanitation. We examine historical progress in energy access in relation to other living standards. We assess regional patterns in the pace of progress and relative priority accorded to these different services. Countries in sub-Saharan Africa would have to undergo unprecedented rates of improvement in energy access in order to achieve the goal of universal electrification by 2030. World over, access to clean cooking fuels and sanitation facilities consistently lag improved water and electricity access by a large margin. These two deprivations are more concentrated among poor countries, and poor people in middle income countries. They are also correlated to health risks faced disproportionately by women. However, some Asian countries have been able to achieve faster progress in electrification at lower income levels compared to industrialized countries’ earlier efforts. These examples offer hope that future efforts need not be constrained by historical rates of progress.

Subfields: Energy Engineering and Power Technology, Nutrition and Dietetics, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/92d1ae4b4b102ce9b6f66d8a4d27c2565b5a4dc7

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In Energy Engineering and Power Technology

In Nutrition and Dietetics

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Citations in the corpus

Energy poverty and public health: Global evidence (2021, background): “Furthermore, this risk is likely to affect women to a greater extent because of common gender roles related to household chores such as cooking (Rao and Pachauri, 2017).”
Electricity access and income inequality in South Africa: Evidence from Bayesian and NARDL analyses (2020, background): “However, when considering the impact of infrastructure countries where weak governance, distorted public investment choices, and corruption are a reality, the benefits of infrastructural expansion that result in higher growth are not necessarily equally shared and could result in increased inequalit”
Energy Poverty and Its Implication on Standard of Living in Kirinyaga, Kenya (2018, background): “About 83% of households in sub-Saharan Africa rely on traditional fuels while 74% lack electricity [9, 10] and despite the fact that energy resources are more than sufficient to meet domestic needs, they remain underexploited and access to modern services is limited [11, 12].”