Ruhr Economic Papers

Ruhr Economic Papers #680
Outdoor Cooking Prevalence in Developing Countries and its Implication for Clean Cooking Policies
by Jörg Langbein, Jörg Peters and Colin Vance
RWI, 03/2017, 27 S./p., 8 Euro, ISBN 978-3-86788-788-5 DOI: 10.4419/86788788
downloadAbstract
More than 3 billion people use wood fuels for their daily cooking needs, with detrimental health implications related to smoke emissions. Global initiatives to disseminate clean cooking stoves emphasize technologies that are either expensive, such as electricity and gasifier stoves, or for which supply chains hardly reach rural areas, such as LPG. This emphasis neglects that many households in the developing world cook outdoors. Our calculations demonstrate that for such households, already the use of less expensive biomass cooking stoves can substantially reduce smoke exposure. The cost-effectiveness of clean cooking policies can thus be improved by taking cooking location and ventilation into account.
JEL-Classification: Q53, I12, O13
Keywords: Air pollution; health behavior; energy access