Energy poverty and its relationship with health: empirical evidence on the dynamics of energy poverty and poor health in Australia

Heather Brown and Esperanza Vera-Toscano

SN Business & Economics, 2021, vol. 1, issue 10, 1-34

Abstract: Abstract Does poor health increase the likelihood of energy poverty or vice versa creating a vicious poverty trap? We use data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics of Australia (HILDA) survey from 2005–2018 to explore if these two processes are dynamically related across a number of subjective and objective measures of physical and mental health as well as subjective and objective measures of energy poverty. We employ univariate dynamic models, introduce controls for initial conditions, and explore inter-dependence between energy poverty and health using a dynamic bivariate probit model. Our results show that controlling for initial conditions impacts on the magnitude and significance of the lagged coefficients. We only find cross-dependency effects between energy poverty and health for subjective measures of energy poverty. This suggests that individuals’ feelings about being in energy poverty may impact on their health leading to poor health/energy poverty traps. Targeting individuals in financial stress/debt may be one way to reduce these poor health/energy poverty traps.

Keywords: Energy poverty; Health; Dynamic bivariate probit; Australia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 D63 I14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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DOI: 10.1007/s43546-021-00149-3

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