49 Table A2.18: Shares of total household expenditure on LPG for all households and for purchasing households in Albania (%)

|**Quintile**|**Rural**|**All households**<br>**Urban**|**Total**|**U**<br>**Rural**|**ser households**<br>**Urban**|<br>**Total**|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|**1**|1.7|3.3|2.4|3.1|4.7|3.8|
|**2**|1.9|2.5|2.1|2.8|3.6|3.1|
|**3**|2.0|2.9|2.4|2.7|3.6|3.2|
|**4**|2.3|2.4|2.4|2.9|3.2|3.1|
|**5**|1.9|1.8|1.8|2.3|2.7|2.5|
|**All**|2.0|2.4|2.2|2.8|3.3|3.1|

_Source:_ Authors’ calculations.

# **Brazil (POF 2008–2009)**

The data are taken from the 2008–2009 Consumer Expenditure Survey (POF) administered by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). The fieldwork for the survey was carried out between May 2008 and May 2009.

The value of all non-purchased items was about 11 percent of total purchased expenditure, while non-purchased food accounted for about 20 percent of all non-purchased items. These ratios tended to decline at the upper quintile levels. The fullest set of data provided by the survey had deflated all items.

The questionnaire asked a single question concerning LPG: the expenditure during the previous 90 days. The survey also asked for expenditures on a range of other sources of energy, without specifying what these were used for or distinguishing between purchased and freely acquired. The Ministry of Energy publishes annual average retail prices in the country’s 27 regions (ANP 2010), and this study used the national average price for 2008 and 2009 of 2.66 reais per kg. The coefficient of variation (not adjusted for regional populations) across regional average retail prices was 0.2, indicating that 95 percent of prices were within 60–140 percent of the national average, possibly reflecting size of Brazil and the need of retail prices to reflect internal transport costs. As long as these price variations were weakly correlated with the variations in survey variables, the bias in the selection and consumption equations would still be small, but the calculated quantities consumed could have large measurement errors.

Brazil exhibited a much higher selection rate of LPG than other countries studied, recording a national average uptake rate of 88 percent of households (Table A2.19). LPG was used by the great majority of households at all income levels in both rural and urban areas. The share of households using LPG increased with income level in rural areas but fell from 90–95 percent to less than 80 percent in the top urban quintile. Nationally, of the 6 million households that had not purchased LPG during the 90 days of the survey period, 1 million had paid for natural gas. Of the nearly 38 million households that had purchased LPG, only 75,000 had also paid for natural gas. Of the households not using LPG in the top urban quintile, 99 percent were connected to electricity and 41 percent to natural gas. In the top rural quintile of non-LPG users, 79 percent were connected to electricity but none to natural gas. Although there is no information on the choice of fuel for cooking, these numbers suggest that the highest-income households had switched to natural gas, if available, or electricity for cooking. LPG is sold in 2-, 13-, 20-, and