Who Adopts LPG as the Main Cooking Fuel and Why? Empirical Evidence on Ghana Based on National Survey

Amin Karimu, Justice Tei Mensah and George Adu

World Development, 2016, vol. 85, issue C, 43-57

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to identify the factors that influence the probability of adopting LPG as the main cooking fuel in Ghana using household level data gleaned from last two nationwide household surveys (GLSS 5 & GLSS 6). Using a flexible semi-parametric specification, the following were uncovered. First, we find socioeconomic and demographic factors such as income, education, access to urban infrastructure, and location of household, as key drivers of households’ choice of LPG as main cooking energy source. Again the influences of these factors are stable across time, and with a strong price effect. The evidence shows that urban households with better socioeconomic and demographic factors are likely to adopt LPG as the main cooking fuel relative to households in rural areas and also urban households with poor socioeconomic and demographic factors. Finally, we observe that the imposition of fully parametric structure (functional form) prior to estimation on factors such as age of household head, income, and household size as done in the literature is inappropriate, at least in the case of Ghana and tend to bias the marginal effects. There is strong evidence of variations in the response rate of LPG adoption over the domains of income, household size, and the age of the household head. The results suggest a policy dichotomy between rural and urban dwellers for it to be effective.

Keywords: fuels; cooking; households; development; energy poverty; Ghana (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (28)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X15306756
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Who adopts LPG as the main cooking fuel and why? Empirical evidence on Ghana based on national survey (2016)
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:85:y:2016:i:c:p:43-57

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2016.05.004

Access Statistics for this article

World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes

More articles in World Development from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().