A Regional Appraisal of Electricity Accessibility Determinants

Abstract

The majority of developing nations worldwide face severe challenges in ensuring universal electricity access for their respective populations. Hence, this study focuses on assessing the factors stimulating and inhibiting national electricity access rates in 61 developing nations from six global regions during the 2000–2020 period. For analytical purposes, both parametric and non-parametric estimation techniques that are efficient in handling major panel data-related problems are used. Overall, the results reveal that a higher influx of remittances sent by the expatriates does not directly influence electricity accessibility. However, adoption of clean energy and improvement in institutional quality promote electricity accessibility while higher income inequality undermines it. More importantly, good institutional quality mediates between international remittance receipts and electricity accessibility as results endorse that international remittance receipts and institutional quality improvement jointly exert electricity accessibility–promoting impacts. Moreover, these findings depict regional heterogeneity while the quantile-based analysis highlights contrasting impacts of international remittance receipts, clean energy use, and institutional quality across different quantiles of electricity accessibility. Contrarily, worsening incidences of income inequality are evidenced to undermine electricity accessibility across all quantiles. Therefore, considering these key findings, several electricity accessibility–boosting policies are suggested.