Household fuel choice in Zimbabwe: An empirical test of the energy ladder hypothesis

• Published in: Resources and Energy Vol. 9; no. 4; pp. 347 - 361
• Main Authors: Hosier, Richard H., Dowd, Jeffrey
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam Elsevier B.V 01.12.1987; Elsevier; Amsterdam :Elsevier Science Publishers,1993
• Series: Resources and Energy
• ISSN: 0165-0572; 0928-7655; 1873-0221
• DOI: 10.1016/0165-0572(87)90003-X

The ‘energy ladder’ is a concept used to describe the way in which households will move to more sophisticated fuels as their economic status improves. This paper applies a multinomial logit formulation of the energy ladder to household energy-use data from Zimbabwe. The results show that although households do move away from wood to kerosene and electricity as their economic status improves, a large number of other factors are important in determining household fuel choice. The policies which can be used to encourage substitutions are therefore rather limited, and will prove more effective in the urban areas where higher incomes provide greater flexibility.