Which socioeconomic factor as a basis for grouping population yields the highest intergroup, but the lowest intragroup, heterogeneity in cooking-fuel choice? In this paper, using post-earthquake data on 747,137 households from Nepal, we construct a Euclidean dissimilarity matrix that exhibits the link between the households’ cooking-fuel choice and their socioeconomic group identities. We then employ PERMANOVA, a distance-based multivariate semiparametric method, and find that ethnicity as a grouping factor leads to about 39.1% of intergroup variance in cooking fuel choice, followed by income (26.3%), education (12.6%), and location (4.1%). We also find two distinct clusters of ethnic groups exhibiting similar fuel-choice behaviors. These findings underscore the importance of ethnic-group specific policies in promoting clean cooking in post-earthquake Nepal.
Following the 7.8 Mw Gorkha Earthquake in Nepal on April 25, 2015, the Kathmandu Living Labs in collaboration with the National Planning Commission (the Government of Nepal), carried out the largest household survey ever done in Nepal using mobile technology. Although the primary objective of this survey was to assess damages inflicted by the quake and identify beneficiaries eligible for government’s housing reconstruction grants, the data contain many other kinds of valuable socio-economic information, including the types of fuel used by households for cooking and lighting from 11 of the most earthquake-affected districts of Nepal, excluding the Kathmandu valley.
The data for all 11 districts were downloaded from the 2015 Nepal Earthquake: Open Data Portal (http://eq2015.npc.gov.np/).
| S.No. | Analysis |
|---|---|
| 1.00 | Home |
| 1.01 | Data Pre-processing |
| 2.01 | Data Preparation to Generate Choropleth Maps |
| 2.02 | Generate Choropleth Maps |
| 3.01 | Baseline Data |
| 4.01 | Ordination Analysis |
| 6.01 | Permanova Test |
| 7.01 | Bootstrap: Prepare Input |
| 7.02 | Bootstrap: Perform Permanova |
| 7.03 | Bootstrap: Summarize Result |
| 7.04 | Bootstrap: Analyze Stats |
R-codes used for data analysis is available at https://raunakms.github.io/diversity_cooking_fuel and can be downloaded from https://github.com/raunakms/diversity_cooking_fuel
Shrestha, Ratna K. and Shrestha, Raunak. Group segmentation and heterogeneity in the choice of cooking fuels in post-earthquake Nepal. 2020. (submitted) https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.09616