Does conflict aggravate energy poverty?

Abstract

A country grappling with conflict faces a multitude of socioeconomic challenges. In addition to human costs, conflicts are observed to destroy a country's energy infrastructure, such as power plants, transmission lines, and fuel supply chains, inter alia. As such, conflicts reduce access to energy products as well as clean and appropriate technologies in the afflicted economy. This aggravates the competition for resources and the energy deprivation problem among the country's survivors. Against this backdrop, this study examines the relationship between energy poverty and internal conflict, as well as the impact of internally displaced persons on energy poverty. Our study uses data from the World Bank and the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) database for 94 countries from 1996 to 2021, and employs panel logistic regression and various other estimators. We find that internal conflict and internally displaced persons contribute to increased energy poverty within and between economies, which is attributed to reduced energy consumption and limited access to electricity and clean cooking. Our results are robust to endogeneity, specification, omitted variable bias, and alternative measures of conflict.