Demand for cooking fuels in a developing country. To what extent do taste and preferences matter?

Wisdom Akpalu, Isaac Dasmani and Peter B. Aglobitse

No 243, Working Papers from Economic Research Southern Africa

Abstract: Overreliance on biomass energy, such as firewood and charcoal, for cooking in developing countries has contributed to high rates of deforestation and resulted in substantial indoor pollution which has negatively impacted the health of many individuals. However, the effectiveness of public policies aimed at encouraging households to switch to cleaner fuels, such as liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) and kerosene, hinges on the extent to which they are mentally committed to specific fuels. Using data on four cooking fuels (charcoal, firewood, LPG, and kerosene) from the Ghana living standards survey, we found strong evidence that the most preferred fuel is LPG, followed by charcoal, with kerosene the least preferred. In addition, with the exception of kerosene that has price-elastic demand, the price elasticities of demand for the fuel types examined are inelastic. This finding suggests the so-called fuel-ladder is not robust.

Keywords: Demand; for; fuel; Taste; and; preferences; Ghana (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q41 Q48 Q23 D13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara, nep-dev and nep-iue
Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
http://econrsa.org/home/index.php?option=com_docma ... ad&gid=358&Itemid=67 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Demand for cooking fuels in a developing country: To what extent do taste and preferences matter? (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:rza:wpaper:243

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Economic Research Southern Africa
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Yoemna Mosaval ().