Elicitation of the Determinants of Energy Poverty in Cote d’Ivoire

Résumé

The aim of this paper is twofold. It provides a comparison of the main approaches used to compute energy poverty indices and investigates the determinants of energy poverty. The two main approaches for computing energy poverty index are compared and the best performing is used. Using the data from the Living Standard Measurement Survey of 2015, the estimates highlight that 74.89 percent of the population suffer from energy poverty. The deprivation score is 0.1578 higher for households that are poor in comparison to those who are not economically poor, and 37.71 percent of this difference is due to differences in characteristics between poor and non-poor. The analysis reveals that education is negatively correlated with energy poverty and that above 53, age is positively associated with energy poverty. Regional as well as urban-rural differences play an important role in energy poverty. These results call for removing accessibility constraints by reinforcing energy supply especially for elderly and accounting for household’s head characteristics while designing policy to alleviate energy poverty.