Energy poverty, housing conditions, and self-assessed health: evidence from Poland

Abstract

Energy poverty, i.e., inefficient heating and insufficient access to energy services, can turn a shelter into a health hazard. We find that substandard housing and ineffective heating is associated with a higher risk of poor health in an urban context. We surveyed people living in two middle-sized cities in a coal-dependent region of Poland and used objective and subjective indicators of energy poverty and self-assessed health status. We demonstrate that people who live in substandard housing are more likely to exhibit poor musculoskeletal and cardiovascular outcomes, by 10 and 6 pp, respectively than otherwise similar people living in suitable housing conditions. We show that energy-poor people who use coal or a wood stove have a 24 pp higher likelihood of respiratory disease than the energy-poor who live in flats connected to district heating. We also find that a significant amount of the explained variance in the probability of respiratory disease is attributable to energy poverty. To improve the housing conditions and reduce the risk of poor health outcomes, we recommend two policy instruments: 1) a full subsidy for thermal retrofits and connecting multi-family buildings to the district heating network and 2) a targeted energy voucher for clean heating.

Keywords:

• energy poverty
• heating
• housing
• health
• air pollution

Subject classification codes::

• I14
• I32
• D10
• Q53

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Descriptive statistics of our sample are shown in Table A1 in the Appendix.

2 The weighting procedure is described in Appendix B.

3 We also included questions on psychiatric/other disorders in the questionnaire. The response rates for these questions were low, and would not allow for detailed modelling. We matched the diseases from the “other” category to the three main disorders in all of the cases the data allowed. We decided against modelling the remaining responses, as they differed substantially; e.g., allergies and cancer would be included in one category of disorders.

4 Each indicator provides supplementary information: the correlation between particular indicators is relatively low. The highest observed correlation between the components of an indicator is 0.81 between a cardiovascular disease confirmed by a physician and a doctor’s appointment.

5 We decided against using a multinomial probit because particular outcomes (diseases) can overlap, even though it affects only a small share of our sample (8-9%). We run a probit model for robustness and report the results in the Appendix A, Table A5.

6 While the methods we apply are in line with previous research (e.g., Llorca et al., 2020; Oliveras et al., 2020), we focus on detailed health outcomes, and on differences between individuals who are and are not in energy poverty.

7 The social proposition of the energy allowance included a one-off, 3,000 PLN (approx. 635 EUR) allowance for people with low incomes living in single-family houses and 1,000 PLN (approx. 170 EUR). The social project is aimed at households with the lowest incomes, regardless of the heat source they use, meeting the income criteria under the so-called “Anti-inflation Shield” enacted by the Polish government in 2021.

Additional information

Funding

This paper was financially supported by the European Climate Foundation. We thank Karol Madoń for his insightful comments. The usual disclaimers apply. All errors are ours.