Religiosity and Energy Poverty: Empirical evidence across countries
Introduction
Energy poverty is fast becoming an area of concern for researchers and policymakers across the globe (Boardman, 2013, Nussbaumer et al., 2013, Churchill and Smyth, 2020). Energy poverty is defined as the “absence of sufficient choice in accessing adequate, affordable, reliable, high-quality, safe, and environmentally benign energy services to support economic and human development” (Reddy et al., 2000 p. 44). In the policy and political landscape, some commitments have been made in principle to ensure that energy poverty is brought under control, if not eradicated (International Energy Agency, 2020). While there are efforts to make energy accessible, affordable, reliable and sustainable, they still fall short of eradicating energy poverty globally (International Energy Agency, 2020).
The prevalence of energy poverty is largely dependent on its determinants. Existing studies have looked at factors like ethnic diversity (Churchill and Smyth, 2020), financial inclusion (Koomson and Danquah, 2021), gambling (Farrell and Fry, 2021), race (Wang et al., 2021), gender (Robinson, 2019), temperature shocks (Feeny et al., 2021) and material deprivation resulting from the lack of income as determinants of energy poverty (Harrison and Popke, 2011, Boardman, 2013, Day et al., 2016, Bednar and Reames, 2020). Factors relating to beliefs and culture are less pronounced as determinants of energy poverty. Culture is believed to influence the desire and ability of an individual to engage in any economic activity (Weber, 1930, Barro and McCleary, 2003). With religion seen as an important dimension of culture, it influences the level of economic development and poverty within a country (Weber, 1930, Barro and McCleary, 2003). However, little to no attention has been paid to the role of culture in affecting energy poverty. The possible reason for omission from the literature may be due to the difficulty in finding reliable data across countries.
Recent works on religiosity have established a link between religiosity and positive outcomes such as health (Ellison, 1991), subjective wellbeing and income (Gruber, 2005, Bettendorf and Dijkgraaf, 2010, Churchill et al., 2019, Bryan et al., 2021). Other studies have established adverse economic effects due to increased involvement in religious attendance and trade-off with production (Barro and McCleary, 2003, Herzer and Strulik, 2017). While the vast relationship between religiosity and development have been identified, little is known about the relationship between religiosity and energy poverty. Moreover, these diverging effects of religiosity on varying economic development measures make it worthwhile to examine its relationship with energy poverty.
This study examines the effect of religiosity on energy poverty using religiosity measures from the World Values Survey and energy poverty measures from the World Development Indicators. Responses to questions on the importance of religion, comfort from religion, and attendance to religious activities were used as measures of religiosity. Due to the absence of individual energy poverty measures for varying countries, we aggregate individual-level responses to a national level. We use electricity access and consumption as energy poverty measures in our baseline model and access to clean fuels and technology for cooking as robustness checks of the baseline results.
We utilise a step-wise linear regression model and find a positive relationship between religiosity and energy poverty. Specifically, an increase in population share that frequently attends religious gatherings leads to high energy poverty. However, the magnitude of the effect decreases with the inclusion of country-level controls like GDP per capita, population, and corruption index. Our results are consistent with series of robustness checks.
Exploratory regressions suggest that our religiosity measures operate by reducing trust, specifically, the part of trust that leads to establishing economic relationships among others within a society. We find no consistent movement in the other measures of social capital.
To relate our study to existing analytical frameworks or theories in the literature, the findings in this study is in line with the time trade-off theory of Iannaccone (1998), which states that the more time households devote to religious activities, the less time they spent on secular production and consumption. The theory asserts that increased religiosity from frequent religious activities leads to the attainment of an afterlife utility. Furthermore, such devotion leads to the reduction of time to undertake any economic activity, reducing the purchasing power to access or consume energy (Azzi and Ehrenberg, 1975, Martin, 1993).
Our study contributes to the literature in the following ways. Existing studies examine the relationship between religiosity and subjective or objective measures of wellbeing at the micro-level (Ellison, 1991, Churchill et al., 2019). Other studies also examine the role of religion mostly on economic growth, economic development and multidimensional poverty (Barro and McCleary, 2003, Deneulin and Rakodi, 2011, Mersland et al., 2013, Bryan et al., 2021). To the best of our knowledge, no study in the literature has empirically examined the relationship between religion and energy poverty. Examining the effect of religiosity on multidimensional poverty limits the heterogeneous effect of religion. Therefore, it is worth examining energy poverty in isolation, given that various determining factors influence various aspects of multidimensional poverty.
We contribute to the literature by estimating the distributional effect of religiosity on energy poverty. Most existing studies use either binary outcomes or indices, making it difficult to examine along the distribution of energy poverty. Moreover, we use the unconditional quantile technique by Firpo et al. (2009), which accounts for the distributions in the outcome and variable of interest.
The rest of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 reviews the mechanisms through which religiosity affects energy poverty. Section 3 details the data and variables used in the analysis. Section 4 presents the empirical strategy adopted. Sections 5 Results, 6 Discussion of results present the results, robustness checks and discussion of the findings. Section 7 concludes.
Section snippets
Why should religiosity affect energy poverty?
To the best of our knowledge, no study in the literature directly addresses the relationship between energy poverty and religiosity. However, we discuss two strands of the literature, social capital and life satisfaction, that indirectly link religiosity and energy poverty.
Variables of interest
Data on religiosity are taken from six waves of the World Values Survey (WVS).1 The first wave of the survey was conducted from 1981 to 1984, and the sixth wave was from 2010 to 2014. The WVS is an individual cross-sectional data of nationally representative samples from about 100 countries. The data is widely used in the estimation of values on religion and perception of life in general (Churchill et al., 2019).
The first
Identification strategy
The estimation of the relationship between religiosity and energy poverty requires the specification of a robust identification strategy. The identification model is specified as an OLS regression of the form:
where is the outcome variable; electricity consumption or access for country . is our variable of interest; the share of the population that acknowledge religion as important, find comfort in religion or attend religious activities at least once a week.
Religion is important
Table 1 presents the baseline estimates from Eq. (1), using the population share that considers religion to be important as our religiosity measure. The effects of religiosity on electricity access and electricity consumption are presented in Panels A and B. Covariates are consecutively included to examine the robustness of the parameter of interest. Each model also reports the mean and standard deviation of the outcome variables.
In Panel A, the table shows a negative relationship between
Discussion of results
Energy poverty has been found to have a ravaging impact on the livelihood of people. Extant literature has examined the relationship between energy poverty and other variables and has found mixed outcomes. However, the relationship between religiosity and energy poverty currently lacks in the literature. We examine this relationship using religiosity measures from six waves of the World Values Survey and energy poverty measures from the World Development Indicator. We find a significant
Concluding remarks
In conclusion, we examined the effect of religiosity on energy poverty using religiosity measures from the World Values Survey. Our results indicate that religiosity influences energy poverty. Specifically, an increase in the share of the population that attend religious gatherings frequently reduces the population share that consumes and accesses electricity. We suggest that religion should be considered when making crucial decisions that affect people’s lives in society. Governments may
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Akwasi Ampofo: Conception and design of study, Acquisition of data, Analysis and/or interpretation of data, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. Matthew Gmalifo Mabefam: Conception and design of study, Analysis and/or interpretation of data, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgement
We are grateful to three anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback in helping shape this paper. (Akwasi Ampofo, Matthew Gmalifo Mabefam).
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