Energy poverty: consequences for respiratory health and labour force participation in Cameroon

ABSTRACT

Insufficient access to modern forms of energy is an important issue for development. This has made the concept of energy poverty to be widely discussed. There is a consensus on the fact that energy poverty has serious effects on health, education, and other socio-economic aspects of individuals. However, the measurement of energy poverty and its effects on labour force participation is generally absent or inaccurate especially at the micro-economic level in developing countries. The objective of this study is therefore to analyse the relationship between energy poverty, respiratory health and participation in the labour market. The data comes from the fourth Cameroon household survey carried out in 2014. The trivariate recursive probit model shows that energy poverty increases the risk of respiratory illnesses and that these illnesses have a negative effect on the labour force participation, especially for women.

KEYWORDS:

• Energy poverty
• respiratory health
• labour force participation
• trivariate probit model

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Congo basin is the second largest tropical forest ecosystem after the Amazonia.

2 In this framework, the urban is made up of towns of 50,000 inhabitants or more; the semi-urban of towns of 10,000 to less than 50,000 inhabitants, and rural areas by settlements of less than 10,000 inhabitants.

3 The descriptive statistics of all the variables are presented in the table.

4 Stabridis and van Gameren (2018) use this variable as exclusion restriction in the equation of the prevalence of cough in Mexico.