Household electrification, food consumption and welfare nexus in Sri Lanka: an intertemporal analysis

Abstract

A growing body of literature suggests that access to electricity has a positive impact on household’s living standards and social welfare. This paper sheds new light on this discussion. Using expenditure dependent equivalence scales, this paper examines the impact of electricity access on food consumption economies of scale (FCES) and thereby the poverty measurements of households with and without access to electricity in Sri Lanka during 1990-2016. Results indicate that a low-income household of four adults with access to electricity spends about 20% less on food compared to a similar household without access to electricity. The results also reveal that although the incorporation of FCES into poverty measurements reduces the overall poverty levels considerably, the reduction in poverty levels is about 1.2% higher for households with electricity at the national level. These observations are consistent across the national and sub-national levels, however, with varying magnitude.

Keywords:

• household electrification
• consumption economies of scale
• food consumption
• poverty
• intertemporal change

JEL Codes:

• D12 I32 D63 D19

Acknowledgment

Many thanks are owed to Emeritus Professor Christine Smith, Associate Professor Andreas Chai and Dr Shyama Ratnasiri for their feedback for an earlier version of this research and for anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments to improve the quality of this paper. I gratefully acknowledge the comments for an earlier version of the paper received at the 6^th meeting of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality (ECINEQ) in Luxembourg, 2015. Further appreciations are due for the Department of Census and Statistics, Sri Lanka, for providing access to Household Income and Expenditure Survey Data and for Ms. Tanya Parker for editorial assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Ethical approval

This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

Availability of data and material

The data used in this paper can be accessed through Department of Census and Statistics, Sri Lanka. The data access policy can be found in Data dissemination guidelines.

Notes

1 In the interest of brevity, we do not provide all Engel curve estimation results here. These results are available upon request.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maneka Jayasinghe

Dr Maneka Jayasinghe is the Chair of Business and Senior Lecturer in Economics in the Asia Pacific College of Business and Law at Charles Darwin University, Australia. She is an applied economist with research interests in the areas of consumer demand analysis, tourism analysis, and poverty, inequality and gender. She has published a number of papers in international refereed journals, such as Energy Economics, Journal of Travel Research, Journal of Happiness Studies, International Journal of Tourism Research, Social Indicators Research and Applied Economics.