Abstract
Energy poverty is high up on national and European Union policy agendas. A number of possible indicators to measure the issue have been identified in the literature, but comparable data with European coverage is scarce. The EU Commission thus proposes four independent indicators on the “EU Energy Poverty Observatory” based on self-reported items from the pan-European surveys on income and living conditions (SILC) and household budgets (HBS). It is of increasing public interest to analyse social impacts of energy policies, and quantify energy poverty indicators also from modelling. This paper first shortly outlines how the expenditure-based indicators using HBS micro data may be directly linked to existing macroeconomic models through their defining variables (energy expenditure and income). As endogenous modelling based on micro data is difficult, the link may be country-specific elasticities. The main contribution of the paper is a systematic in-depth sensitivity analysis of the two indicators to changes in income and energy expenditure following varying patterns in the underlying distributions of the micro data. The results may be used by future soft links to models. The results display sometimes counterintuitive effects. We find that whether these indicators increase/decrease after a change of income or energy expenditure largely depends on the specific country-wise income and energy expenditure distribution between households on a micro-level. Due to their definition, the examined indicators are especially sensitive, when income changes alter the indicator threshold values, which in these cases are the median values in underlying distributions. We discuss these findings and relate them to several indicator shortcomings and potential remedies through changes in indicator definition.
Highlights
This contribution is an extended version of our paper published at 2020 SDEWES conference, Cologne, Germany [1]
We find that the high share of energy expenditure in income (HS) indicator behaves relatively stable across the scenarios and change levels analysed
For the analyses in this paper, we systematically applied partial changes to incomes and energy expenditures in the national micro data of the household budgets (HBS) for evaluating the resulting changes to the two expenditure-based energy poverty metrics implemented by the European Union (EU)
Summary
This contribution is an extended version of our paper published at 2020 SDEWES conference, Cologne, Germany [1]. We complemented analyses by additional sensitivity calculations, included respective results chapters and completed interpretations and conclusions. Energy poverty is an issue in a developing country context. Throughout the last two decades, several developments in Europe on both the supply and demand side have aggravated the problem: on the one hand, the financial crisis in 2008 and the related loss of income and assets have impacted the ability of households to pay for energy in several countries [3]. The liberalisation of electricity and gas markets, climate policies, and the transition of energy systems has put an additional economic burden on household budgets, hitting lower-income households hard see e.g., [4,5]
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary 
Published Version (
Free)
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call