ABSTRACT

Lack of access to modern electrification limits educational progress, highlighting the critical role of energy interventions in advancing educational outcomes, particularly in developing countries. Despite increasing interest in this topic, the causal effects of energy interventions on educational outcomes in developing countries remain largely inconclusive. This paper consolidates existing evidence by conducting a meta-analysis of 33 studies using robust Bayesian model averaging methods, synthesizing 301 effect sizes. We evaluate the impact of modern energy interventions—including rural household electrification (RHE) and solar electrification—on nine distinct educational outcomes. Our findings indicate that these interventions substantially improve educational outcomes, particularly for children, with an average increase of 15.4 percentage points in key metrics such as educational attainment, school enrolment, and daily study hours. Specifically, RHE increases children’s daily study hours by 55 minutes and enhances lifetime earnings potential through additional schooling years, while solar electrification yields a 42-minute increase in study hours. However, effects on adult literacy and learning outcomes are weaker, suggesting that energy access must be complemented by targeted educational interventions. Heterogeneity in effect sizes underscores the importance of contextual factors, such as geography and demographics. Importantly, we detect no significant publication bias, and Hamiltonian Markov Chain meta-regressions reveal that household-level experimental designs yield more reliable estimates. These results highlight the transformative role of modern energy infrastructure in bridging educational gaps and fostering sustainable development. Policymakers are encouraged to prioritize investments in rural electrification and integrate energy access with broader educational and economic strategies, such as pairing electrification with enrolment and adult literacy programs to maximize impact.

ABSTRACT

This paper provides the first causal evidence of how energy efficiency policies shape housing markets in developing economies, exploiting the staggered rollout of South Africa’s National Energy Efficiency Strategy (NEES). Using a quasi-experimental design and nationally representative household stated preferences, we show that low-income households adopting NEES-compliant appliances experienced a 3.3 percentage points increase in house prices and an 8 percentage point rise in rents. Dynamic event studies reveal persistent effects, with prices rising by 12 percentage points and rents by 21 percentage points seven years post-intervention. Mechanism analyses indicate these gains are driven by direct capitalisation of energy-efficient upgrades, remittance-financed appliance purchases, reduced air pollution, and linked income channels. Effects are concentrated in urban areas and among Black and Coloured homeowners, underscoring heterogeneous socioeconomic impacts. The results highlight energy efficiency’s role as a “first fuel” for sustainable development, demonstrating its potential to simultaneously mitigate climate externalities and stimulate housing market dynamism. Policy implications emphasise targeting rebate programmes to low-income households, integrating efficiency incentives with broader social policies, and monitoring rebound effects to maximise net emissions reductions. By bridging the gap between environmental economics and housing market research, this study offers actionable insights for designing equitable climate policies in resource-constrained settings.

ABSTRACT

The debates on how inequality, economic development and urbanization affects the environment has been intense, but lacks the African perspective. Hence, this study examined these relationships, as well as other pathways to environmental degradation in Africa and her regions, such as FDI. Also, it explored the relationships amongst urbanization, economic development and inequality. Using Pedroni’s cointegration and Quantile regression over 1996–2014 period, findings show cointegration and regional heterogeneities on the environmental, urbanization, economic development and inequality transmissions. Particularly, in Africa, inequality engenders more environmental degradation across all quantiles. Moreover, Africa and her regions are characteristic of a homogenous N-shaped relationship between economic development and environmental degradation. Similarly, a homogenous pollution haven hypothesis is true for Africa. However, EKC between economic development and inequality holds for countries with low and median initial levels of income inequality, but do not hold for countries with the highest initial levels. Furthermore, the EKC hypothesis holds between urbanization and inequality and, between urbanization and environmental degradation. Thus, urbanization complemented with employment creation strictly reduces inequality. Consequently, amongst policy targets are to bridge the income gap, reduce environmental degradation via strict environmental laws on imports, and building more sustainable urbanization and economic development processes for African countries.

ABSTRACT

Over the years, economic policy in Nigeria has been a subject of concern for policymakers. The effectiveness of this policy in providing basic necessities for Nigerians has also been in question. There have been several controversies in terms of its implementation and sustainability over the years. In this paper, we investigate the impact of economic policies on providing sustainable water and sanitation facilities in Nigeria. In our analysis, the binary logistic model is adopted to understand how effective these policies are in providing these facilities. The results show that expenditure on social and community service leads to an increase in the use of unsafe sanitation facilities in the country. Furthermore, our study also shows that expenditure in the health services sector helps in reducing the use of such unsafe facilities. From the results, we recommend that policies aimed toward providing sustainable water and sanitation facilities need proper checks, improvement, and effective implementation so as to achieve viable results. These can be done by implementing supervised community projects on sanitation facilities and also by educating local communities through organized symposiums and workshops in rural and certain urban areas in the country.

ABSTRACT

There are increasing debates on the relationship between economic complexity and environmental degradation. This study deepens our understanding of this nexus in 11 emerging economies given the moderating role of energy consumption while controlling for economic development, trade openness and population growth. The findings from the quantile regression technique reveal that emerging economies are characteristic of low energy consumption, leading to insignificant contributions of economic complexity to environmental degradation across the spectrum as they also have very low-trade openness. Further results show the invalidity of the EKC between energy use (such as fossil fuels) and environmental degradation in emerging economies. Moreover, the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) between economic development and environmental degradation is valid especially for those countries in the low and median quantiles (Egypt, Indonesia, and Vietnam). Also, the EKC hypothesis between population and environmental degradation is valid only for countries in the high and highest quantiles (Korea Republic, Turkey, Mexico and Iran). Finally, the results revealed that trade openness strictly reduces environmental degradation across the spectrum. Policy implications, limitations of the study and direction for future research are discussed.

ABSTRACT

This paper provides new causal evidence on the environmental and health co-benefits of residential energy efficiency policies in developing countries, focusing on South Africa's National Energy Efficiency Strategy (NEES). Leveraging exogenous variation in programme eligibility among grid-connected low-income households and repeated cross-sectional data from the 2005-2018 General Household Survey, I estimate intent-to-treat effects using two-way fixed effects and dynamic event studies. NEES significantly increased the adoption of energy-efficient appliances, raising uptake from 22% to 41%, and increased domestic electricity use by 7.4 percentage points. It also reduced perceived environmental pollution, especially air and water pollution, asbestos exposure, and littering, with refrigerator and freezer ownership driving the strongest effects. Furthermore, NEES reduced non-chronic morbidity incidence by 3 percentage points, particularly tuberculosis and diarrhoea, via environmental improvements and behavioural substitution away from polluting fuels. Mechanism analyses identify both direct pollution-reduction pathways and indirect health gains through improved food preservation, reduced cooking frequency, and structural housing upgrades. These findings highlight how energy efficiency interventions, when equitably targeted, can deliver multidimensional welfare gains in low-income settings, advancing climate mitigation and public health objectives in tandem.

ABSTRACT

ABSTRACT

This paper develops a model of multi-unit auctions with affiliated values, predicting that marginal winners face elevated failure risk, a question with implications for renewable energy policy affecting millions of UK households. Identification is challenging because developers endogenously bid based on unobserved cost expectations, as the model’s winner’s curse mechanism implies. To test the model’s prediction of discontinuous failure rates at auction thresholds, I exploit budget exhaustion cutoffs using sharp regression discontinuity with administrative data covering all six UK Contracts for Difference allocation rounds, 2014–2025.

ABSTRACT

Artificial intelligence may reshape global labour markets, yet projections for 700 million workers in low-income countries rely on frameworks calibrated to advanced economies with fundamentally different structural conditions. This paper extends the Acemoglu-Restrepo task-based framework to economies characterised by agricultural dominance, large informal sectors, and vast “automation headroom”—the gap between technically feasible and economically viable automation. The three-sector model is calibrated by combining externally sourced parameters from the automation literature with internal moment matching to ILOSTAT employment shares, STEP task content measures, and LSMS-ISA wage differentials.