Browsing by Author "Das, Ipsita"

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    Gender-Differentiated Health and Related Impacts of Improved Cooking Technologies in Rural India
    (2012-04-27) Das, Ipsita
    The literature base examining the impact of household energy interventions on the health outcomes of populations exposed to indoor air pollution ignores gender dimensions. Understanding these gender-differentiated impacts is crucial to undertaking effective energy interventions because women suffer more from energy poverty compared to men. Using rare events logistic regression analysis, I estimate the differences by gender in the probability of health outcomes, depending on stove type and fuel type. These technologies include clean stoves (such as improved cookstoves and household biogas production plants) and clean fuels (liquid fuels such as LPG and kerosene) among rural households in India. I find that the likelihood of a negative health condition is higher in households using traditional stoves and dirty fuels; in unclean stove-using or unclean fuel-using households, for most health outcomes, women suffer more compared to men. In unclean stove-using and dirty fuel-using households, there is no additional effect of gender on children’s writing and math cognitive skills or BMI measurements.
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    Impact of Policy Options on Accelerating Clean Cooking Transition in the South-East Asian Region
    (2022-04-15) Zong, Jiahui
    Around 2.6 billion people globally still cook using solid fuels and kerosene in open fires and inefficient stoves. These inefficient cooking practices produce high levels of household air pollution, causing health damages. Since women and girls often take primary responsibility for cooking and collecting fuels, they are disproportionately affected by traditional cooking, worsening gender inequality. In addition, cooking without clean stoves and fuels also causes severe environmental harms, in the form of harmful, climate-warming emissions and unsustainable harvesting of wood fuels. This study focuses on South-East Asia Region, where 1.54 billion people lack access to clean cooking fuels and technologies. The analysis utilizes the Benefits of Action to Reduce Household Air Pollution (BAR-HAP) Tool developed by Dr. Marc Jeuland and Dr. Ipsita Das at Duke University for the World Health Organization, to assess the impact of different policy interventions on cooking-related household air pollution and related health issues. This tool quantifies and monetizes the costs of interventions to the health system and households, and the benefits to health, time saved, and reduced climate impact. This Master’s Project focuses on three fiscal policies: stove subsidy, fuel subsidy, and stove financing. Although the calculated amount of benefits differs in each country’s case, and the actual implementation might lead to progress that differs from the model’s projection, a faster transition is more cost-beneficial from overall health, gender equality, and environmental perspectives. Based on the results, stove financing is the most cost-beneficial in Bangladesh, rural Bhutan, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, while stove subsidy is the most cost-beneficial in Thailand. Governments in SEAR should also prioritize the rural populations to maximize the return from policy intervention.
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    Taxes and Subsidies and the Transition to Clean Cooking: A Review of Relevant Theoretical and Empirical Insights
    (2022-11-22) Das, Ipsita; Jeuland, Marc; Plutshack, Victoria; Zong, Jiahui
    United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 7.1 sets a target of ensuring universal access to affordable, reliable, and modern energy services by 2030. Unfortunately, many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are well off course to meet this target, especially with respect to access to clean cooking energy. Though many challenges impede progress, cost barriers are perhaps most significant. This report discusses the role of subsidy and tax policies—levied on both the supply and demand side of this market—in affecting progress toward universal access to clean cooking in LMICs. Moreover, we also combat a common myth among those opposing subsidies for clean cooking: we show that a “fear of spoiling the market” with such incentives finds little empirical support in the literature. This report offers recommendations to policy makers, in addition to a case study on clean cooking transitions in Nepal.