Which Households Are More Energy Vulnerable? Energy Poverty and Financial Inclusion in Turkey

This study examines the effects of financial inclusion on energy poverty using the 2018 Turkish Household Budget and Consumption Expenditure Surveys. The study adopts three different measures of energy poverty and then analyzes the impact of financial inclusion proxied by a multidimensional index on energy poverty using different estimation strategies. After addressing the endogeneity of financial inclusion by instrumenting financial inclusion with access to the nearest bank in a two-stage least squares framework, the empirical results show that financial inclusion significantly alleviates energy poverty while its impact is higher for female-headed households. These findings are robust to Oster's (2019) bounds estimates that deal with omitted variable bias. The results also suggest that health and income are significant through which financial inclusion influences energy poverty. The findings thus point to the need for policies that promote financial inclusion as a way of alleviating energy poverty. (C) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.