**Access or connection to network-based utilities.** The presence or absence of a connection to a centralized network utility does not have the same welfare implications in rural areas as it does in urban areas.  In urban areas, households without connections to central water supply, central sewage, or central heating/natural gas have a lower quality of life than those with these services.  However, in rural areas this may not be the case as adequate substitutes such as well water may be available.  For example, no one would assume that rural households without district heating are deprived of heating.  Quite the opposite, district heating (and many other network services) only make economic sense in densely populated areas.  Access to district heating should never be used as a proxy for availability of heating for rural households.  Furthermore, as this study shows, connection to network utilities does not mean those services are provided and care should be taken to not assume that connection means provision.

# **2.3.3. Poor coverage of infrastructure and energy in multi-topic questionnaires**

Overall in the region, the coverage of infrastructure and energy poverty tends to be fairly poor. This is illustrated in Table 2.2 showing the availability of 26 desired indicators for 20 transition countries. Regionwide, out of the 26 desired indicators constructed for this study, only about 70 percent could be measured with recent available data. There are also large disparities across countries in terms of survey coverage of infrastructure and energy indicators. The percentage of desired indicators that could be measured ranged from 48 percent in the Belarus 2001 HBS to 89 percent in the Albania 2002 LSMS and Turkmenistan 1998 LSMS.

In general, LSMS surveys in the region provided much more comprehensive coverage of infrastructure and energy than the HBS surveys. The average coverage rate of the desired indicators was 78 percent in LSMS surveys, compared with only 64 percent in HBS surveys. The possibility to relate welfare outcomes with access to infrastructure and energy services was also much more limited in HBS than LSMS surveys. Among countries with available recent LSMS surveys, the coverage of infrastructure and energy poverty was the worst in Russia (48 percent) and the best in Albania and Turkmenistan (89 percent). Among those with HBS-type surveys only, the coverage was the poorest in Belarus (48 percent) and the most comprehensive in Georgia (85 percent).

Table 2.2. also shows great disparities in the dimensions of infrastructure and energy poverty that can be measured in the region. While most surveys provided information on the availability of infrastructure and energy services, few contained information on whether these services were reliable and paid for and even fewer provided information on the consumption of infrastructure and energy services.

Moreover, not all types of infrastructure and energy services were covered equally. In terms of availability, public transportation and electricity connections were the least well documented in the region, although for different reasons. In the case of public transportation, few surveys asked any questions and those questions were not comparable (Box 2.2). In the case of electricity, countries assume all households are connected, thus choose not to include this question. As regards reliability, information on the quality of district heating was extremely limited and even information on water and electricity was available from fewer than half the surveys. In terms of payment rates, the information provided for natural gas was extremely poor.

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