EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Fuel poverty in residential housing: providing financial support versus combatting substandard housing

Dorothée Charlier (), Berangère Legendre and Anna Risch

Applied Economics, 2019, vol. 51, issue 49, 5369-5387

Abstract: Between 50 and 125 million Europeans are unable to afford the energy needed for adequate heating, cooking, light and use of appliances in the home. Tackling fuel poverty has thus become a public policy challenge. In this article, we assess the effectiveness of social energy subsidies and social housing to reduce fuel poverty. The literature reports that rising fuel prices, low incomes and energy-inefficient housing are the main causes of fuel poverty. Existing public policies focus mainly on price- and income-based measures to reduce fuel poverty, such as social energy subsidies. This type of policy is palliative as it does not permit to sustainably eradicate fuel poverty. Other policies aim to encourage renovation in order to improve energy efficiency. Those policies are curative as they sustainably reduce one cause of fuel poverty: energy inefficiency. In this article, we focus on another public policy to tackle fuel poverty: social housing. We believe that this policy could be preventive, as the literature reports the better energy efficiency of social housing. We use matching methods and find that living in social housing decreases fuel poverty by 5.4% to 9.1%. On the contrary, social energy subsidies have no effect on fuel poverty.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00036846.2019.1613501 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:taf:applec:v:51:y:2019:i:49:p:5369-5387

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAEC20

DOI: 10.1080/00036846.2019.1613501

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economics is currently edited by Anita Phillips

More articles in Applied Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:taf:applec:v:51:y:2019:i:49:p:5369-5387