Energy Policies and Multitopic Household Surveys

Accurate data on household energy use, combined with other data on household well-being (including consumption, income, health, and education), is essential to monitor progress in the household energy transition from traditional biomass fuels to modern fuels and electricity and to evaluate the effect of government energy policies on living conditions. Multi-topic socioeconomic household surveys, such as the World Bank's Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS), can provide data with which to make these measurements. Designers of LSMS and other multi-topic household surveys can use these guidelines to help ensure that their surveys provide more extensive and reliable data on household energy use than they do at present. The guidelines highlight weaknesses in current LSMS surveys with respect to energy questions and discuss how such questions can be better formulated to yield more useful data for energy policy analysis. Household energy surveys implemented over the years offer lessons on which formulations of questions work best and provide the most consistent results. This experience has been drawn on to develop the prototype fuel and electricity modules contained in these guidelines. Indicators that may be constructed from the data are also discussed; in this regard, the present report contributes to international efforts to define energy indicators for sustainable development. It is anticipated that these guidelines will help LSMS designers incorporate energy modules of the type proposed herein into LSMS survey questionnaires. Over time, as more surveys containing these modules are implemented, more experience will be gained on which questions work best in particular country settings and which are most useful for policy analysis.