City Household Energy Choices and Their Influencing Factors in Pakistan

Abstract

The dissimilarities of cooking fuel are subjected to several attributes associated with the household’s personal life and social life. A household chooses firewood for cooking purposes because of easy access and affordability but also uses multiple energy sources at the same time. These choices become conditional upon a number of factors. These factors can be income, education, location, access, and awareness. The current study attempts to explore the influencing factors of joint energy choices for cooking in the cities of Pakistan. The study is grounded upon the microdata, collected by PSLM at the household level. The study uses Multivariate Probit (MVP) to capture jointly chosen sources of cooking energy and their influencing factors. The study found that households residing in D I Khan and tank city are dominantly using firewood and households residing in Karachi Lahore and Peshawar prefer to cook on gas energy. The study also found that education, internet use, and income are significantly associated with the choice of clean energy such as Gas and LPG for cooking at the household level in the cities of Pakistan. Distance to road and time to markets are negatively associated with clean sources of energy for cooking in Pakistan. Keywords: Cities, Energy choices, Cooking energy, and Household. JEL classification Q40 R20

Economic evaluation of household firewood consumption and carbon footprints in Pakistan: implication for climate change mitigations

“…This finding is aligned with a previous study by Rahut et al (2020), which also reported higher usage of firewood for cooking in KP households as compared to other regions. This may be due to various factors such as easy access and availability of firewood, as revealed in the study conducted by Khan et al (2022). Moreover, households in KP may have limited access to clean energy sources such as LPG due to underdeveloped infrastructure (Mosa et al, 2020).…”