Fuel Poverty and Health: A Shared Agenda for Policy

Abstract

of health as we regard health status to be closely related to previous health trajectories. Considering that unobserved heterogeneity might influence health status and fuel poverty simultaneously, we have corrected for the endogeneity bias that could affect our results. We conclude that being fuel-poor increases the risk of bad health by slightly more than a factor of 7 for those whose health is already poor and by 1.82 for those in good health. For policy makers, combatting fuel poverty reduces sources of discomfort which might also severely affect the health of a dwelling’s inhabitants, and reduce health spendings.