Fuel poverty and financial distress

Economic growth and environmental technology simultaneously important for reducing energy poverty and ecological footprint in E7 economies: do political institutions play a role?

Energy poverty and climate change are major concerns for the emerging seven countries. Therefore, this study explores the economic growth impact on reducing energy poverty and ecological footprint in the emerging seven economies from 2000 to 2019. Energy poverty is measured using three disciplines: availability poverty, accessibility poverty, and affordability poverty. We applied a new dynamic method, "bias-corrected method of moments estimators (2021)," for long-run outcomes. This study used the environmental Kuznets curve-approach to measure economic growth's scale effect and technique effect to reduce energy poverty and ecological footprint. Importantly, the study explores the mediating role of politically stable institutions in mitigating environmental and energy poverty. Our findings validate that energy poverty and ecological footprint could not reduce at the initial stage of economic growth. However, the later development stage shows a positive effect on reducing energy poverty and ecological footprint. These results validated an inverted U-shaped Kuznets curve hypothesis for emerging seven. Further, the result found that strong political systems are more quick-witted and have the legislative power to swiftly implement beneficial policies to pull out of the vicious circle of energy poverty. Further, environmental technology significantly reduced energy poverty and ecological footprint. The causality analysis entails that a bidirectional exists between energy poverty, income, and ecological footprint.

Pay (for it) as you go: Prepaid energy meters and the heat-or-eat dilemma

The "heat-or-eat" dilemma, a trade-off typically between food consumption and heating, may elevate public health concerns during the 2022 energy-price crisis. Our paper contributes to the literature by exploring the role of domestic energy prepayment meters (PPMs) in the heat-or-eat dilemma, focusing on the association between PPM use and fruit and vegetable consumption. Using a representative sample of 24,811 individuals residing in Great Britain (January 2019-May 2021), we find robust evidence of lower fruit and vegetable consumption amongst individuals using PPMs, compared to those using post-payment energy bill payment methods. On average, our point estimates suggest that individuals using a PPM consume 2.7 fewer portions of fruit and vegetables per week. Our findings hold when bounding analysis is employed to account for omitted variable bias. Using a suite of IV approaches to further alleviate endogeneity concerns we found that our ordinary least squares results are consistent as opposed to IV models. Further robustness analyses highlight the deleterious impact of PPMs on people's healthy eating habits relevant to the consumption of enough fruit and vegetables. Our results suggest that targeted support for PPM users may have beneficial effects on people's fruit and vegetable consumption patterns.

Cold homes and mental health harm: Evidence from the UK Household Longitudinal Study

Cold homes are associated with a range of serious health conditions as well as excess winter mortality. Despite a comparatively mild climate cold homes are a significant problem in the UK, with a recent estimate finding that over one-quarter of low-income households had been unable to adequately heat their home in winter 2022. The magnitude of cold housing in a country that benefits from a mild climate indicates indifference towards, or acceptance of, a significant minority of people living in inadequate conditions on the part of policy makers. Cold homes are therefore a source of social harm. Recent changes to the household energy price cap, the rising cost of living, the ongoing effects of the benefit cap, and below inflation uprating to social security benefits is likely to greatly exacerbate this issue. In this research we use data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study to explore whether living in a cold home causes mental health harm. We control for mental distress and housing temperature on entry to the survey in order to account for the potentially bi-directional relationship. Multilevel discrete-time event history models show that the transition into living in a home that is not suitably warm is associated with nearly double the odds of experiencing severe mental distress for those who had no mental distress at the beginning of the survey; and over three times the odds of severe mental distress for those previously on the borderline of severe mental distress. These results show the significant costs of failing to ensure that people are able to live in homes in which they are able to live comfortably by even the most basic standards. These costs will be felt not just individually, but also more broadly in terms of increased health spending and reduced working.