Energy Poverty and Tariff Segmentation in Argentina: Distributive Incidence and Gender Effect

Energy poverty is a phenomenon that affects current societies. Deprivation in the satisfaction of energy services constitutes one of the most relevant problems in developing countries and, also, in Argentina. The measurement of energy poverty moves between unidimensional and multidimensional indicators, but in all of them affordability plays a central role. Like economic poverty, the incidence of energy poverty has unequal behaviour between groups. One of the instruments mostly used to alleviate the effects of energy deprivation is the application of subsidy policies. Argentina has changed from a generalized scheme to targeting subsidies based on socioeconomic levels, with strong impacts on poverty and energy inequality. This chapter analyzes the incidence of the new subsidy scheme applied in Argentina from a perspective of distributive incidence and energy poverty, with a focus on the gender effect. The results indicate that the new subsidy policy increases the population in energy poverty, which is inefficient in reducing previous energy inequalities but does not generate a difference effect depending on the gender of the head of the household. Specifically, the findings strengthen what was found in previous research regarding the non-existence of gender inequalities in the phenomenon of energy poverty in Argentina.