Australia's gambling epidemic and energy poverty

Childhood adversity and energy poverty

“…A series of recent studies has sought to look behind why households have low incomes and/or pay high energy prices and link these reasons to the incidence of energy poverty. For example, recent studies have examined the roles of factors such as problem gambling (Farrell and Fry, 2021), neighbourhood ethnic diversity (Awaworyi , forest fires (Paudel, 2021) and temperature shocks (Feeny et al, 2021) in contributing to the prevalence of energy poverty. Other studies have considered factors that potentially reduce the extent of energy poverty, such as greater financial inclusion (Dogan et al, 2021;Koomson and Danquah, 2021) and off-farm employment (Lin and Zhao, 2021).…”

Are you puffing your Children's future away? Energy poverty and childhood exposure to passive smoking

“…Another potential problem is that state-level instruments, such as tobacco prices, have less predictive power than individual-level instruments, contributing to them being weak instruments (French & Popovici, 2011). Relatedly, Farrell and Fry (2021) find that state-level gambling expenditure was a weak instrument for an individual-level problem gambling severity index in their study of the relationship between problem gambling and energy poverty.…”

“…The main advantage of the Lewbel (2012) method is that it can be employed in cases when a conventional instrument is not available or weak (Mishra & Smyth, 2015). It has been widely employed as an identification strategy in the literature on energy poverty (see, e.g., Ampofo & Mabefam, 2021;Awaworyi Churchill et al, 2020b;Farrell & Fry, 2021;Zhang et al, 2021). The Lewbel (2012) approach does not require one to satisfy the exclusion restriction.…”

“…As a result, a new strand of literature has emerged that seeks to understand the behavioural, environmental and social factors that explain why people are in energy poverty. While this "literature is still in its infancy" (Apergis et al, 2021), it has shown that characteristics, such as ethnic diversity and trust (Awaworyi Churchill & Smyth, 2020), home ownership status (Abbas et al, 2020), human capital accumulation (Apergis et al, 2021), problem gambling (Farrell & Fry, 2021) and financial inclusion and savings behavior (Dogan et al, 2021;Koomson & Danquah, 2021) are important determinants of energy poverty.…”

“Aussies love a bet”: Gamblers discuss the social acceptance and cultural accommodation of gambling in Australia

“…1 Approximately $25 billion is lost on gambling in Australia each year, with almost two-thirds of these losses occurring in the states of New South Wales and Victoria. 2 Health and social harms associated with gambling include anxiety and other mental health disorders, 3,4 family conflict, 5 and energy poverty (for example, not being able to pay for essentials such as heating), 6 with the annual social cost of gambling in Victoria estimated at $7 billion. 7 Despite this, gambling has become increasingly normalised in Australia, with a range of socio-cultural, environmental, commercial and political processes contributing to the availability and accessibility of gambling, the cultural endorsement of gambling, and the embedding of gambling in everyday life.…”