Published on June 30, 2012 at 3:53 AM
"Household budgetary concerns appear to dominate any health concerns associated with smoke from nontraditional cookstoves," said Robert Bailis, associate professor of environmental social science at the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.
The researchers also conducted a randomized controlled trial in 42 villages in the Bangladeshi districts of Hatiya and Jamalpur to estimate how sensitive Bangladeshi households are to the price of nontraditional cookstoves.
They found that the demand for nontraditional cookstoves at both market and highly subsidized prices is very low and that demand is highly sensitive to price. At full price, the adoption rate for chimney cookstoves was 2 percent and for efficiency models 5 percent. In addition, a 50 percent discount resulted only in a 12 percent increase in the adoption of efficiency models and a 5 percent increase in the adoption of stoves with chimneys.
"We find consistent evidence across both analyses suggesting that women in rural Bangladesh do not perceive indoor air pollution as a significant health hazard," said Dwivedi.
Source: Yale University