Gender equity is connected to modern energy services in many ways, but quantitative empirical work on these connections is limited. We examine the relationship between a multi-dimensional measure of women’s empowerment and access to improved cookstoves, clean fuels, and electricity. We use the World Bank Multi-Tier Framework survey datasets from seven countries that include almost 25 000 households in Africa and Asia. First, we apply principal component analysis to construct a household level empowerment index, using data on women’s education, credit access, social capital, mobility, and employment. Then, we use simple regression analysis to study the correlation between empowerment and energy access at the household level. We find a positive association between the women’s empowerment index and energy access variables, though this household pattern does not hold across all countries and contexts. While we do not claim that these relationships are causal, to our knowledge this is a fresh analysis of how the empowerment of women is differentially correlated with household energy access across geographies and technologies. Thus, our analysis provides a first step to further work aimed at clarifying gender-energy linkages.

India faces significant air quality challenges, contributing to local health and global climate concerns. Despite a national ban on agricultural residue burning and various incentive schemes, farmers in northern India continue to face difficulties in curbing open-field burning. Using data from 1021 farming households in rural Punjab in India, we examine the patterns and drivers of the adoption of no-burn agriculture, particularly for farmers who mulch instead of burning crop residue. We find a growing trend in no-burn farming practices among farmers between 2015 and 2017, with the highest adoption rates among large farmers compared to medium and small farmers. Our findings suggest that access to equipment and learning opportunities may increase the likelihood of farmers using straw as mulch instead of burning it. Specifically, social learning appears to increase the likelihood of farmers embracing no-burn practices relative to learning from extension agencies. Furthermore, the form of learning depends on farm size. While large and medium farmers exhibit a variety of learning strategies, small farmers primarily self-learn. These results underscore the importance of a multiprong policy that provides sufficient access to equipment and a combination of learning platforms that enabling farmers from different land classes to adopt no-burn technologies.

The employment structure of India's formal manufacturing sector has undergone substantial changes since the early 2000s with a steep rise in the use of contract workers in place of directly hired workers. Much of the existing literature has attributed the widespread use of contract labour to India's rigid employment protection legislation. The resulting informalisation of the workforce in the organised sector raises concerns about the sustainability of employment growth. Using a 14-year plant-level panel data from the Annual Survey of Industries, we find that in addition to labour market rigidities and the existence of a wage differential between contract and directly hired workers, plants in the organised manufacturing sector have another important incentive to hire contract workers. Plants appear to be using contract workers to their strategic advantage against the directly hired workers to keep their bargaining power and wage demand in check. Importantly, the strength of this bargaining channel varies across plants depending on their capital intensity of production, size and existing contract worker intensity.

Despite women bearing primary responsibility for cooking and fuel collection in low- and middle-income countries, they often have limited influence over household purchases such as cookstoves. This gap is widely hypothesized to constrain the adoption of clean cooking technologies. While prior research has established a link between women’s intra-household bargaining power and cooking decisions, most studies rely on unidimensional measures that obscure important nuances. This paper advances the literature by examining how multidimensional measures of women’s empowerment relate to electric cooking adoption in rural and urban South Africa, a rare and valuable case study of relatively widespread electric cooking uptake in the Global South. Drawing on five waves of panel data from the National Income Dynamics Study, we construct a composite empowerment variable capturing perceived decision-making authority across five domains and estimate its association with electric cooking use via household- and individual-level logit models. We find that greater female intra-household decision-making power is associated with a higher likelihood of electric cooking adoption. Decomposing the composite measure, we further discover that this relationship is driven primarily by non-financial decision-making authority. Financial decision-making power, whether measured by perceived authority or receipt of a Child Support Grant, shows no significant association with electric cooking use. These findings suggest that policies aimed at accelerating the clean energy transition should prioritize broadening and strengthening women’s roles in household decision-making.