ABSTRACT
Energy poverty, like economic poverty, has gone through the discussion between unidimensionality and multidimensionality. The most recent advances recognise that the situation of energy poverty refers not only to access to energy services but also to the quality of energy and the equipment available to satisfy the various energy uses.
Despite recognising the multidimensionality, most of the antecedents that empirically address the subject do so from a single indicator. The studies commonly resort to the indicator, under which a household is energy poor if it allocates more than 10% of its income to energy expenditure. Using expenditure as input, there are also the indicators, which again analyse the relationship between income and expenditure for energy services.
The objective of this chapter is to carry out an application of the various indicators proposed by the literature for the measurement of energy poverty in the Argentine context and to show the dissimilar results that can be reached depending on the indicator used. On the other hand, a discussion regarding the usefulness of the self-reported energy expenditure indicator will be presented. It The results obtained from the energy expenditure declared in the National Household Expenditure Survey and the expenditure calculated from a model to estimate consumption per household based on its equipment and declaration of use of this survey will be compared.. The main objective of this analysis is to expose that empirically approaching on multidimensional phenomenon with a single indicator based on energy expenditure is an erroneous reduction of a central problem in today's reality.
