Impact of Household Electricity Consumption on Standard of Living in Nigeria

Abstract

This study examined the impact of household electricity consumption on standard of living in Nigeria with level of education, poverty rate, per capita income and life expectancy as proxy for standard of living. Deviating from the popular electricity consumption and economic growth nexus, this present study focused on the impact of electricity consumption on the components of standard of living within the period of 1981 to 2017. The study adopted the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) Bound Test in estimating the long-run and short-run relationship of the variables of the model. The study, therefore, found a positive long-run relationship between household electricity consumption and level of education, poverty rate, per capita income and life expectancy. The study also found significant short-run relationship between household electricity consumption and level of education, poverty rate, per capita income and life expectancy. From the outcome of the study, the researcher concluded that household electricity consumption impacted positively on standard of living in Nigeria although the impact is not large as expected. The study, therefore, recommends amongst others, that government should significantly improve power generation and distribution in order to enhance access to electricity consumption among her citizens in order to improve standard of living.

Keywords: Household Electricity Consumption (HHEC), Standard of living, Poverty rate, Income per capita and Educational enrollment

DOI: 10.7176/JETP/10-1-05

Publication date: February 29^th 2020