The Impact of Electricity Outages on health outcomes of children in Kyrgyzstan
| Author(s): | Yermone Sargsyan MSc., |
|---|---|
| Type: | Article in collection |
| Year: | 2021 |
| Number: | 43 |
| ISSN / ISBN: | |
| Published in: | The 1st IAEE Online International Conference 2021: Energy, Covid and Climate Change. International Association for Energy Economics. |
| Publishing place: | The 1st IAEE Online International Conference 2021: Energy, Covid and Climate Change. |
| Keywords: | electricity disruptions, child-health, transition economies |
| JEL codes: | P18, O13, O15, I15 |
| Suggested Citation: | |
| Grants: | GAUK 327421 Residential Energy Demand, Adoption of Energy Efficient Technologies, and Electricity Disruptions in Transition Economies |
| Abstract: | As electricity prices in developing countries are relatively low to recover the costs of provision, proper investment in infrastructure for generation and distribution of electricity is usually absent. These results in frequent outages or rolling blackouts by the electricity suppliers aimed to manage the difference in supply and demand. Such outages commonly occur in some developing countries and can have a significant impact on certain households. The frequent electricity outages may create sizeable problems for the households in terms of storing food, and cooling their households as the work of refrigerators and AC’s is constantly interrupted, especially in countries like Kyrgyzstan where extremely hot summers are rather a rule than exception. Besides hot summers Kyrgyzstan also faces cold winters, when the temperature can get as low as negative 25 degrees Celsius . In the absence of reliable electricity supply households often use coal or would to heat their homes. According to Akhmetov (2014), most of the residents in these regions who do not have access to the centralized infrastructure burn coal in self-made coal stoves to heat their homes. According to the author this self-made stoves are usually of a poor quality resulting in indoor air pollution, which in turn is a catalyst of various respiratory diseases. All of the above indicates that electricity disruptions may affect the health status of the households negatively, especially among children and elderly. While having any access to the objective measurement of elderly health status maybe problematic, we have readily available objective measurement for health of children aged from 0 to 5 years provided by their anthropometric outcomes like weight for height, weight for age, height for age. Anthropometric outcomes of children are calculated with accordance to WHO in form of deviations (z-score) from the given reference groups. Moreover, micro panel data from Kyrgyzstan allows us to control for rich socio- economic (including information on main heating source, and home appliances) and geographical characteristics of the households to ensure stronger validity of our findings. The association between access to electricity and socio-economic attributes of household- like income, education and health, is well documented in the literature. However, none of the authors studied the effect of electricity outages (as opposed to just access to it). Usually, studies employ binary variable which indicates access to the electricity grid, while in our research we will investigate the effect of frequency of outages instead, which to the best of our knowledge has not been studied yet. We find a negative and statistically significant association between height for age z-score of children, and reported frequency of electricity outages. We also observe generally negative relationship between outages and weight for age z-score. However, this relationship is statistically insignificant |
