The impact of natural gas on health care utilization

Official URL: https://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b2486530_(Table of contents)

This thesis explores a quasi-experiment of gradual expansion of natural gas across the country that substituted coal in heating and cooking purposes. The impact of natural gas on morbidity between 2012 and 2018 is analysed by using fixed effects regression and further by propensity score matching. The Family Physician Centers were effective after 2012 and they are easily available to the population, thus the time span of the thesis starts from 2012. The fixed effects results suggest a small decrease in the per capita visits to FPCs if a province gets access to natural gas pipelines and 16 percent decrease in the FPCs visits with a one-unit increase in natural gas utilization. That is if the number of subscribers per population increases by 0.1, visits to FPCs decrease by 1.6 percent. Since fixed effects method is highly constrained, the thesis also makes use of a weaker method that does not account for time variation: propensity score matching. The results suggest that the intense adoption of natural gas in provinces decreases per capita FPC visits by a 16 percent compared to the provinces where natural gas adoption is hardly ever existent. The thesis could be studied as an example for developing countries as it provides generalized evidence on the impact of switching to a modern and cleaner energy resource that requires a large-scale investment