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Energy poverty and economic development: evidence from BRICS economies

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Abstract

In the development concern, all countries are started increasing production of energy across the world. All countries have started expansion of access to electricity across the nation. As a result, their economic growth significantly progress by increasing the share of access to electricity (energy use). Hence, the aim of this research is to examine the impact of access to electricity on economic development across five emerging countries, spanning the period 1990–2018 and by using the panel modelling methodology. The results of long-run elasticities reveal that access to electricity play a considerable role in promoting economic development across five emerging countries. Furthermore, the results on panel causality tests show the presence of unidirectional causality running from economic development to access to electricity in the short run. However, the study also estimates long-run elasticities for individual economies. This individual country empirical result also shows that access to electricity has a substantial positive impact on economic development for each of the countries. Finally, the empirical findings suggest that governments should act effectively in providing access to electricity for higher economic development in these countries.

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Data availability

Data will be available upon request.

Notes

  1. Raghutla and Chittedi (2020c), Raghutla and Chittedi (2020d), Raghutla et al. (2020), Ummalla and Raghutla (2015) and Raghutla et al. (2018a, 2018b)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Science and Humanities, National Institute of Technology Puducherry, Karaikal, India

    Chandrashekar Raghutla

  2. School of Economics, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, Telangana, India

    Krishna Reddy Chittedi

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  1. Chandrashekar Raghutla
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  2. Krishna Reddy Chittedi
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Contributions

1-Chandrashekar Raghutla: Conceptualization, writing-original draft, resources, methodology and software

2-Krishna Reddy Chittedi: Conceptualization, writing-original draft, review and editing, methodology and supervision

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Correspondence to Krishna Reddy Chittedi.

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Highlights

• Study has been done for BRICS countries over 1900–2018.

• Energy poverty (access to electricity) found to increase economic development.

• Education and income are positively linked with economic development.

• Employment and inflation have negative effect on economic development.

• The study estimated a time series analysis of long-run economic development elasticities.

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Raghutla, C., Chittedi, K.R. Energy poverty and economic development: evidence from BRICS economies. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 9707–9721 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-16174-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-16174-6

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