Financial literacy and clean energy adoption in South Africa

IF 14.2 2区经济学 Q1 ECONOMICS

Energy Economics Pub Date : 2025-09-29 DOI:10.1016/j.eneco.2025.108927

Isaac Koomson , Sefa Awaworyi Churchill , Russell Smyth

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Abstract

We examine the causal effect of financial literacy on clean energy adoption in South Africa. Our main estimates, in which we instrument for financial literacy with mathematics education received, suggest that a unit increase in financial literacy causes a 14.1 percentage point increase in the likelihood of adopting clean energy for cooking, heating or lighting. The magnitude of the size effect when clean lighting use is considered separately is similar to the composite measure, while the effect sizes for clean cooking and heating are much larger. The heterogeneity results suggest that the effect of financial literacy on clean energy adoption is larger in households with a male household head and in households located in rural areas. These findings are robust to alternative estimation methods, alternative identification methods that do not rely on an external instrument and ways of measuring financial literacy. We find that entrepreneurship, financial inclusion and generalized trust are channels through which financial literacy influences clean energy adoption. We conclude by suggesting policies for promoting financial literacy and each of the channels through which financial literacy affects clean energy use to enable households to make sustainable energy choices.

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南非的金融知识和清洁能源的采用

我们研究了金融知识对南非清洁能源采用的因果效应。在我们的主要估计中，我们用接受过的数学教育来衡量金融知识，结果表明，金融知识每增加一个单位，采用清洁能源做饭、取暖或照明的可能性就会增加14.1%。单独考虑清洁照明使用时，尺寸效应的大小与综合措施相似，而清洁烹饪和加热的效应大小要大得多。异质性结果表明，金融知识对清洁能源采用的影响在男性户主家庭和农村家庭中更大。这些发现是稳健的替代估计方法，替代识别方法，不依赖于外部工具和衡量金融素养的方法。我们发现企业家精神、金融普惠和广义信任是金融素养影响清洁能源采用的渠道。最后，我们提出了促进金融知识普及的政策，以及金融知识影响清洁能源使用的每个渠道，使家庭能够做出可持续的能源选择。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Energy Economics ECONOMICS-

CiteScore

18.60

自引率

12.50%

发文量

524

期刊介绍： Energy Economics is a field journal that focuses on energy economics and energy finance. It covers various themes including the exploitation, conversion, and use of energy, markets for energy commodities and derivatives, regulation and taxation, forecasting, environment and climate, international trade, development, and monetary policy. The journal welcomes contributions that utilize diverse methods such as experiments, surveys, econometrics, decomposition, simulation models, equilibrium models, optimization models, and analytical models. It publishes a combination of papers employing different methods to explore a wide range of topics. The journal's replication policy encourages the submission of replication studies, wherein researchers reproduce and extend the key results of original studies while explaining any differences. Energy Economics is indexed and abstracted in several databases including Environmental Abstracts, Fuel and Energy Abstracts, Social Sciences Citation Index, GEOBASE, Social & Behavioral Sciences, Journal of Economic Literature, INSPEC, and more.