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Health awareness and the transition towards clean cooking fuels: evidence from Rajasthan
- Source :
- PLoS ONE, Vol 15, Iss 4, p e0231931 (2020), PLoS ONE
- Publication Year :
- 2020
-
Abstract
- Ensuring affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all by 2030 is part of the internationally agreed Sustainable Development Goals (SDG7). With roughly 3 billion people still lacking access to clean cooking solutions in 2017, this remains an ambitious task. The use of solid biomass such as wood and cow dung for cooking causes household air pollution resulting in severe health hazards. In this context, the Indian government has set up a large program promoting the use of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) in rural areas. While this has led millions of households to adopt LPG, a major fraction of them continues to rely heavily on solid biomass for their daily cooking. In this paper, we evaluate the effect of simple health messaging on the propensity of these households to use LPG more regularly. Our results from rural Rajasthan are encouraging. They show that health messaging increases the reported willingness to pay for LPG, and substantially increases actual consumption. We measure this based on a voucher, which can only be used if LPG consumption is doubled until a certain deadline. Households exposed to health messaging use the voucher about 30% more often than households exposed to a placebo treatment. We further show that the impact of our very brief, but concrete health messaging is close to the effect of a 10% price reduction for a new LPG cylinder. Finally, our study raises some interesting questions about gender-related effects that would be worth consideration in future research.
- Subjects :
- Male
Rural Population
Economics
Health Behavior
energyaccess
Social Sciences
energy access
Surveys
Geographical Locations
Cognition
Medicine and Health Sciences
Psychology
Public and Occupational Health
Cooking
Materials
experiment
health
Pollution
Knowledge
Petroleum
Health Education and Awareness
Research Design
Physical Sciences
Engineering and Technology
Medicine
10113 Institute of Political Science
Female
Behavioral and Social Aspects of Health
Research Article
Asia
Science
Materials Science
Decision Making
household air pollution
India
1100 General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
Fuels
Research and Analysis Methods
1300 General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
Air Pollution
320 Political science
Humans
1000 Multidisciplinary
Survey Research
Ecology and Environmental Sciences
Cognitive Psychology
Biology and Life Sciences
Bassia scoparia
Energy and Power
Health Care
People and Places
Cognitive Science
clean cooking fuels
willingness to pay
Finance
Neuroscience
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- PLoS ONE, Vol 15, Iss 4, p e0231931 (2020), PLoS ONE
- Accession number :
- edsair.pmid.dedup....09da1bebc09db5ee803d368fcb845436