Does Household Electrification Supercharge Economic Development?

摘要

While launching the Sustainable Energy for All program to promote rural electrification in 2011, then-United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon described energy as "the golden thread that connects economic growth, increased social equity, and an environment that allows the world to thrive" (SEFA 2012). Reinforcing this perspective is the strong, positive cross-country correlation between electricity consumption and GDP per capita documented in the macroeconomic literature (for example, Burke, Stern, and Bruns 2018), which we present in Figure 1. Today, nearly a billion people still live without access to electricity (IEA 2018). Thus, access to energy has reemerged as a key priority for policymakers and donors in low-income countries. Electrification could allow poor households to have easy access to lighting for evening chores or studying and power for phone charging and possibly for a range of new small business activities, both on and off the farm.