Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

• mirhossain mousavi ¹
• niloofar nori ²

¹ hmousavi.

² Department of Economics, Faculty of Social Sciences and Economics, Alzahra University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

Energy is one of the most essential and vital goods in the household consumption basket. Access to energy for meeting basic needs is a fundamental right of every consumer. However, due to the occurrence of the energy imbalance phenomenon in Iran's economy, this access has become limited in recent years. In light of this issue, the aim of this paper is to determine the minimum subsistence level of energy consumption for Iranian households. To achieve this, data on household income and expenditure from 1991 to 2022 were used, categorized into five groups: food, clothing, housing, energy, and others. The Linear Expenditure System (LES) and seemingly unrelated regressions (SUR) method were employed to estimate the expenditure function and determine the necessary costs for meeting the minimum subsistence level. The results reveal that the highest marginal propensity to non-subsistence expenditure belongs to the food group, accounting for approximately 40%, while the lowest marginal propensity is observed in the energy group, at about 6%. In the energy category, the average expenditure required to meet the minimum subsistence level increased from 176,000 IRR in 1991 to 87,472,600 IRR in 2022. In other words, the expenditure required for energy to meet minimum subsistence needs grew approximately 497-fold during this period.

Keywords

• minimum subsistence
• energy
• Linear Expenditure System
• seemingly unrelated regressions

Main Subjects

• مطالعات اقتصادی مرتبط با حامل‌های انرژی (فسیلی، تجدیدپذیر و برق)