Fuel poverty and access to electricity: comparing households when they differ in needs

Abstract

Although sequential stochastic dominance techniques have been used in the literature to make comparisons of income poverty which are robust to the assumptions made about the economies of scale within households, the techniques could be applied to a much wider set of issues. In this paper, these techniques are applied to energy deprivation in Guatemala. Fuel poverty is compared among households with and without access to electricity, and it is assessed whether access to electricity for those who do not have access currently would eliminate the observed difference in fuel poverty between the two groups of households.