Multidimensional Energy Poverty and its Dynamics in Rural and Small Towns of Ethiopia: A Fuzzy Set Analysis
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Date
2021-10
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A.A.U
Abstract
Ethiopia, like many others in the sub-Saharan Africa, hosts its largest share of population
in its rural areas and small towns. And among many factors, these areas of the
country are characterized by having lower access to modern energy fuels. Thus, using
panel data set constructed from the three rounds of Ethiopian Socio Economic Survey, this
paper has attempted to investigate the level of multidimensional energy poverty and its
dynamics in these areas. Unlike number of researches made on energy poverty, this paper
has attempted to divert from the traditional crisp poor non poor dichotomization using
a fuzzy set approach which represent each household by the degree of energy poverty it
faced in values that range between zero and one through the use membership functions.
Given selected dimensions which include type of cooking fuel, indoor air pollution, source
of light and access to media and communication, and applying methods of average, intersection
and union as techniques to aggregate degree of deprivation across each dimension
selected, a fuzzy multidimensional energy poverty index for the study area was determined,
and it was further decomposed to see which dimensions contribute the most for it. During
the first survey, households in the study area were found to be faced with 79.98% average
deprivation while experiencing a minimum degree of deprivation that reaches to 47.64%
in each selected dimension. These numbers fall only slightly during the last survey where
average deprivation declines to 72.41% while minimum deprivation in each selected dimension
falls to 34.61%. Across each survey, households were found to be faced with a
degree of deprivation that is close to 100% at least in one of the dimensions selected. These
results are further supported by a fuzzy set longitudinal analysis made with the application
of joint membership functions. And the rate of re-entry is found to be 98.11% and exit rate
42.24%. Further, given the fractional nature of the dependent variable, dynamic fractional
regression was used to investigate the presence of state dependence, and a one percent rise
in the propensity of experiencing deprivation in all dimensions in the previous period was
found to cause a 3.8% rise in a given year’s deprivation overlap. And among other selected
determinate variables of energy poverty, number of rooms available, proportion of
children aged seven and above, log of real income per adult equivalent and year of survey
are found to have significant and negative effect on households energy poverty. And proportion
of labour aged female household members, living in rural areas, and compared to
region Tigray living in other selected regions of the country are found to cause a significant
and positive influence on households energy poverty.
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Keywords
Multidimensional energy poverty, fuzzy set analysis, dynamic fractional regression