Publication: Understanding and Addressing Energy Poverty in Romania: Exploring the Roles of Structural and Behavioral Constraints
Loading...
Published
2024-09-17
ISSN
Date
2024-09-17
Editor(s)
Abstract
Addressing energy poverty is paramount for economic development, given its close connection to income poverty. Research indicates that lower-income households are disproportionately affected by energy price increases. Such households lack the financial means to absorb these shocks, which can lead to decreased overall welfare. This vulnerability can result in households’ refraining from using energy or using less efficient and dirtier technologies and sources, particularly during winter, which poses health risks. Moreover, global evidence suggests that residing in energy-deprived circumstances adversely affects overall well-being, human development, and environmental outcomes. The imperative to measure and address energy poverty in Romania is underscored by the potential development benefits and the European Commission’s prioritization of this issue within the European Just Transition context. This report aims to fill that gap by providing evidence on critical questions about the energy status of Romanian households. The report focuses on four key topics, relying on existing official household surveys and new qualitative and quantitative data collected in June–July 2023, with the aim of providing an updated snapshot of energy vulnerability among Romanian households.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Robayo-Abril, Monica; Karver, Jonathan; Rude, Britta; Tomio, Ailin; Silvestri, Alessandro; Cadena, Kiyomi. 2024. Understanding and Addressing Energy Poverty in Romania: Exploring the Roles of Structural and Behavioral Constraints. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/42158 License: CC BY-NC 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Conceptualizing and Measuring Energy Poverty in Bulgaria(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-06-28)Addressing energy poverty has emerged as one of the main challenges for Bulgaria's poverty and social inclusion policy, particularly in the context of the European Green Deal and the current crisis in Ukraine. To tackle the adverse impacts of energy poverty effectively, a crucial initial step involves accurately defining and measuring this issue. Identifying households affected by energy poverty is essential for shaping and implementing targeted policies. This study explores various definitions of energy poverty within the Bulgarian context by (1) systematically reviewing current methodologies and measures employed in the EU context; (2) assessing the feasibility of implementing these measures in Bulgaria based on data availability, comparing the incidence of energy poverty using alternative measures, and presenting characteristics of energy poverty to inform potential policy instruments; and (3) providing policy recommendations for the measurement and monitoring of energy poverty. The way energy poverty is measured and the overlap with income poverty shape the types of policy solutions perceived to be possible and appropriate to address it. The evaluation supports the need to shift from single indicators to multidimensional approaches in measuring energy poverty. Additionally, enhancing the granularity, quality, and frequency of expenditure and income surveys can contribute to easier operationalization of these concepts and a better understanding of the demographics of energy poverty. The study proposes exploring alternative data generation methods, such as smart meters, further to enhance insights into the dynamics of energy poverty.Publication Statistically Matching Income and Consumption Data(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-09-23)To design effective policy instruments that target the energy poor in Romania, it is crucial to understand who the energy poor are. However, these types of analyses are limited by the current data environment. While monetary energy poverty estimates rely on data from expenditure surveys, traditional welfare indicators and detailed information on access to social protection programs form part of the EU-SILC. Samples of both surveys differ; consequently, record linkage of both surveys is impossible. This paper propose an alternative solution to combine information from both surveys, namely statistical matching techniques. It applies several imputation models to impute information on energy spending shares from the HBS into the EU-SILC based on a set of matching variables, compare the performance of these models and apply the best-performing one. Based on the resulting matched dataset, the results show that nearly all the monetary poor are also energy poor, but that a significant additional share of the population in Romania is energy poor. Energy poverty rates are higher at the lower end of the welfare distribution. This result has significant welfare implications.Publication Honduras Poverty Assessment(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-02)Honduras, already among the poorest countries in the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region, experienced weak poverty reduction in 2014–19 compared to other countries in the region. The COVID-19 pandemic and Hurricanes Eta and Iota led to a rise in poverty from 2019 to 2020; it is likely that poverty will remain above prepandemic levels in 2021. The economic rebound in 2021, as well as the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, led to an increase in food prices; at the same time, Honduras’s population is vulnerable to rising food prices and food insecurity is high. In 2019, the extreme poor spent almost half of their income on food. Additionally, food insecurity was persistently high. A striking feature of Honduras is the deep and widening urban-rural divide in terms of quality of life. There is a wide urban-rural poverty gap for both the moderate and the extreme poor, which reflects significant disparities in access to basic services such as electricity, water, and sanitation, and internet usage, as well as lower human capital accumulation and worsen labor market indicators in rural areas. While overall income inequality has been stagnant since 2014, inequality in rural areas has increased while in urban areas it has declined. The country is one of the most unequal countries in LAC. Hondurans continue to face deep and persistent disparities in access to and quality of education, with rural areas heavily penalized, even before the COVID-19 pandemic, despite high spending on education. Subnational disparities are particularly large; poverty continues to be most heavily concentrated in the country’s southwestern areas, in departments with higher shares of ethnic minorities, and in municipalities located in the south and southwest. This report focuses on the factors that have contributed to these observed poverty and inequality trends and patterns in Honduras.Publication Quantifying Vulnerability to Poverty in El Salvador(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-02)El Salvador is marked by high vulnerability to risks and hazards, such as crime, natural disasters, and migration. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the vulnerability patterns of its population. This paper applies an innovative approach to estimate the population's vulnerability to poverty and analyze its underlying drivers. The findings show that ex-ante vulnerability to poverty decreased over 2016 to 2019, a parallel trend to the poverty reduction observed in the country during this period. This finding comes hand in hand with an increase in the importance of risk factors relative to a low accumulation of assets driving vulnerability. Additionally, household-level shocks play a more significant role than community-level shocks. To address vulnerabilities in the country, the government should invest in adaptive safety nets and risk mitigation strategies.Publication The Gender Gap in Entrepreneurship in Romania(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-11-29)Although female entrepreneurship is crucial to generating sustainable and equitable growth patterns, international evidence shows that women tend to be underrepresented in entrepreneurship, and this gender gap has exhibited remarkable persistence. In this study, we first measure the gender gap in entrepreneurship in Romania by using various data sources. We observe significant gender gaps, with the average gender gap in self-employment rates being 4.2 percentage points when abstracting from observable characteristics. Even when controlling for observable characteristics, the gender gap is persistent (3.7 percentage points). Other measures, such as the share of firms with female owners and top managers, indicate that the gap could be even larger. Moreover, we observe that the entrepreneurial gender gap varies across income quintiles and between rural and urban areas. In the second step, we analyze the potential drivers of women’s engaging less in entrepreneurship by following the model of the “5 M’s” developed by Brush, De Bruin, and Welter (2009). We find that the following drivers play a role in the entrepreneurial gender gap in Romania: gender gaps in financial inclusion and access to assets, harmful gender norms, motherhood, lack of childcare, and eldercare. Our findings suggest the need for a nuanced approach toward female entrepreneurship that factors in the distinct challenges of different groups of women and consists of a menu of policy interventions. Policies should range from improving women’s access to relevant assets, human capital, and networks to addressing harmful gender norms and sparking an entrepreneurial culture in Romania more generally. Lastly, our evidence indicates that women are more interested in “impact” entrepreneurship. As women entrepreneurs in Romania mainly operate in the primary sector, givingthem a leading role in the green transition has great potential for more sustainable and equitable growth patterns.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Global Economic Prospects, January 2025(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-16)Global growth is expected to hold steady at 2.7 percent in 2025-26. However, the global economy appears to be settling at a low growth rate that will be insufficient to foster sustained economic development—with the possibility of further headwinds from heightened policy uncertainty and adverse trade policy shifts, geopolitical tensions, persistent inflation, and climate-related natural disasters. Against this backdrop, emerging market and developing economies are set to enter the second quarter of the twenty-first century with per capita incomes on a trajectory that implies substantially slower catch-up toward advanced-economy living standards than they previously experienced. Without course corrections, most low-income countries are unlikely to graduate to middle-income status by the middle of the century. Policy action at both global and national levels is needed to foster a more favorable external environment, enhance macroeconomic stability, reduce structural constraints, address the effects of climate change, and thus accelerate long-term growth and development.Publication Digital Progress and Trends Report 2023(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-03-05)Digitalization is the transformational opportunity of our time. The digital sector has become a powerhouse of innovation, economic growth, and job creation. Value added in the IT services sector grew at 8 percent annually during 2000–22, nearly twice as fast as the global economy. Employment growth in IT services reached 7 percent annually, six times higher than total employment growth. The diffusion and adoption of digital technologies are just as critical as their invention. Digital uptake has accelerated since the COVID-19 pandemic, with 1.5 billion new internet users added from 2018 to 2022. The share of firms investing in digital solutions around the world has more than doubled from 2020 to 2022. Low-income countries, vulnerable populations, and small firms, however, have been falling behind, while transformative digital innovations such as artificial intelligence (AI) have been accelerating in higher-income countries. Although more than 90 percent of the population in high-income countries was online in 2022, only one in four people in low-income countries used the internet, and the speed of their connection was typically only a small fraction of that in wealthier countries. As businesses in technologically advanced countries integrate generative AI into their products and services, less than half of the businesses in many low- and middle-income countries have an internet connection. The growing digital divide is exacerbating the poverty and productivity gaps between richer and poorer economies. The Digital Progress and Trends Report series will track global digitalization progress and highlight policy trends, debates, and implications for low- and middle-income countries. The series adds to the global efforts to study the progress and trends of digitalization in two main ways: · By compiling, curating, and analyzing data from diverse sources to present a comprehensive picture of digitalization in low- and middle-income countries, including in-depth analyses on understudied topics. · By developing insights on policy opportunities, challenges, and debates and reflecting the perspectives of various stakeholders and the World Bank’s operational experiences. This report, the first in the series, aims to inform evidence-based policy making and motivate action among internal and external audiences and stakeholders. The report will bring global attention to high-performing countries that have valuable experience to share as well as to areas where efforts will need to be redoubled.Publication The Container Port Performance Index 2023(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-07-18)The Container Port Performance Index (CPPI) measures the time container ships spend in port, making it an important point of reference for stakeholders in the global economy. These stakeholders include port authorities and operators, national governments, supranational organizations, development agencies, and other public and private players in trade and logistics. The index highlights where vessel time in container ports could be improved. Streamlining these processes would benefit all parties involved, including shipping lines, national governments, and consumers. This fourth edition of the CPPI relies on data from 405 container ports with at least 24 container ship port calls in the calendar year 2023. As in earlier editions of the CPPI, the ranking employs two different methodological approaches: an administrative (technical) approach and a statistical approach (using matrix factorization). Combining these two approaches ensures that the overall ranking of container ports reflects actual port performance as closely as possible while also being statistically robust. The CPPI methodology assesses the sequential steps of a container ship port call. ‘Total port hours’ refers to the total time elapsed from the moment a ship arrives at the port until the vessel leaves the berth after completing its cargo operations. The CPPI uses time as an indicator because time is very important to shipping lines, ports, and the entire logistics chain. However, time, as captured by the CPPI, is not the only way to measure port efficiency, so it does not tell the entire story of a port’s performance. Factors that can influence the time vessels spend in ports can be location-specific and under the port’s control (endogenous) or external and beyond the control of the port (exogenous). The CPPI measures time spent in container ports, strictly based on quantitative data only, which do not reveal the underlying factors or root causes of extended port times. A detailed port-specific diagnostic would be required to assess the contribution of underlying factors to the time a vessel spends in port. A very low ranking or a significant change in ranking may warrant special attention, for which the World Bank generally recommends a detailed diagnostic.Publication Business Ready 2024(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-10-03)Business Ready (B-READY) is a new World Bank Group corporate flagship report that evaluates the business and investment climate worldwide. It replaces and improves upon the Doing Business project. B-READY provides a comprehensive data set and description of the factors that strengthen the private sector, not only by advancing the interests of individual firms but also by elevating the interests of workers, consumers, potential new enterprises, and the natural environment. This 2024 report introduces a new analytical framework that benchmarks economies based on three pillars: Regulatory Framework, Public Services, and Operational Efficiency. The analysis centers on 10 topics essential for private sector development that correspond to various stages of the life cycle of a firm. The report also offers insights into three cross-cutting themes that are relevant for modern economies: digital adoption, environmental sustainability, and gender. B-READY draws on a robust data collection process that includes specially tailored expert questionnaires and firm-level surveys. The 2024 report, which covers 50 economies, serves as the first in a series that will expand in geographical coverage and refine its methodology over time, supporting reform advocacy, policy guidance, and further analysis and research.Publication Global Economic Prospects, June 2025(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-06-10)The global economy is facing another substantial headwind, emanating largely from an increase in trade tensions and heightened global policy uncertainty. For emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs), the ability to boost job creation and reduce extreme poverty has declined. Key downside risks include a further escalation of trade barriers and continued policy uncertainty. These challenges are exacerbated by subdued foreign direct investment into EMDEs. Global cooperation is needed to restore a more stable international trade environment and scale up support for vulnerable countries grappling with conflict, debt burdens, and climate change. Domestic policy action is also critical to contain inflation risks and strengthen fiscal resilience. To accelerate job creation and long-term growth, structural reforms must focus on raising institutional quality, attracting private investment, and strengthening human capital and labor markets. Countries in fragile and conflict situations face daunting development challenges that will require tailored domestic policy reforms and well-coordinated multilateral support.