- Authors: Dean Spears, Avinash Kishore
- Published in: Economic Development and Cultural Change
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Abstract
Despite the profoundly negative health consequences of indoor air pollution, about half of the households in the world cook using solid biomass fuels. In India, many households use firewood or dung cakes as the primary source of energy for cooking. Burning these unprocessed biomass fuels in traditional open fire burners (called chulhas) results in very high levels of indoor air pollution and an estimated 450,000–550,000 premature deaths and nearly 500 million cases of illness each year. Such indoor air pollution is behind only open defecation and malnutrition as a major cause of disease and death in India. Women and children suffer disproportionately, as they spend more time indoors and women do essentially all of the cooking. A switch to cleaner cooking fuels such as kerosene, liquid petroleum gas (LPG), or biogas would save many lives and reduce suffering from indoor air pollution. However, despite the increased availability of cleaner fuel, households’ transition from traditional cooking fuel has been slow. What explains the transition to clean fuel use? Certainly there are many important factors relevant to households’ use of biomass fuels, including price, accessibility, and a low opportunity cost of time spent collecting wood. This article focuses on the causal role of one factor: the sex of a household’s first child.