Fuel poverty and mental health in a COVID-19 context

Abstract

Fuel poverty is a widespread problem which affects people's health and has serious economic and social repercussions. Mental health has been adversely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and appears to be particularly influenced by fuel poverty. We analyze this relationship while highlighting the unequal vulnerability of individuals in the population. We first built a novel database of 4194 representative observations of the French adult population. We then used a conditional mixed-process model to quantify the causal effect of fuel poverty on mental health using instrumental variables to overcome potential endogeneity. We prove the robustness of this causal effect by providing different sensitivity tests. Our results show that being fuel poor decreases the mental health score by 6.3 points out of 100. Fuel poverty also increases the depression score by 5.35 points, the anxiety score by 6.48 points, and decreases the social health score by 6.82 points. Our results show that tackling energy poverty can lead to positive spillover effects to improve mental health. Mitigation policies to provide energy-efficient housing should also become a priority to address climatic and economic hazards in the long term because they imply co-benefits in health.