Energy poverty and public health: Global evidence

Highlights: • We investigate the impact of energy poverty on public health. • Our results suggest that energy poverty has a detrimental effect on public health. • Living standard serves as a potential channel through which energy poverty affects public health. • Our findings are robust across alternative specifications and measures of health indicators. The impacts of energy poverty on a range of development goals have been widely examined in the literature; however, how energy poverty affects public health has yet to be studied. Using annual data for a broad panel of 175 countries over the period 2000 to 2018, this paper investigates the effect of energy poverty on public health. To identify the causal effect of energy poverty on public health and tackle the issue of endogeneity, we rely on Oster's (2019) bound analysis and the system generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation. Our results show that energy poverty has a detrimental effect on public health. We also find that living standards can serve as a channel through which energy poverty influences health, and that countries with higher standards of living weaken the negative effect of energy poverty on public health. Our results are robust across various specifications and measures of health indicators. Our findings have important implications for policies in public health and transitions to renewable energy.