Fuel Poverty: a Composite Index Approach

Fuel poverty is an increasingly serious problem across countries. However, fuel poverty is not well defined and measured. Today, fuel poverty objective measure which takes into account monetary constraint, bad energy efficiency of the dwelling and heating restriction does not exist. Fuel poverty has been mainly treated as a problem of monetary poverty. However households concerned by a fuel poverty issue are not exactly the same than those concerned by monetary problems. Thus, in this paper, we provide the first Fuel Poverty Index (FPI) taking into account all dimensions of the definition. This index is calculated using objective measures such as (i) the disposable income to consider the monetary constraint, (ii) the energy consumption as a measure of energy efficiency and (iii) the indoor temperature in order to capture heating restriction. Using a matching estimation, the quality of the indoor temperature as a proxy of heating restriction is demonstrated. (authors)