Scandinavian Working Papers in Economics

CERE Working Papers,
CERE - the Center for Environmental and Resource Economics

No 2016:9: 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
Additional contact information
Amin Karimu: CERE and the Department of Economics, Umeå University, Postal: Department of Economics, Umeå University, S-901 87, Umeå, Sweden
Justice Tei Mensah: Department of Economics, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Postal: Department of Economics, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden
George Adu: The Nordic Africa Institute and Department of Economics, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology Kumasi, Postal: The Nordic Africa Institute, Box 1703, SE-75147, Uppsala, Sweden

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, 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

JEL-codes: C14; O13; Q41; Q42

31 pages, April 26, 2016

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