2021 Volume 42 Issue 4 Pages 194-203
This study focuses on household energy expenditure and prices, and clarifies the characteristics of household CO2 emissions by region, energy composition pattern, and income class, based on the statistics of the Ministry of the Environment's survey of household CO2 emissions. It was confirmed that lower income households in northern Japan have a greater burden on energy expenditure. In addition, the impact of energy price changes on demand is more limited for households in lower income and in northern Japan, indicating that the burden of energy expenditure due to higher energy prices is likely to increase. We analyzed the likelihood of an energy shift in the household sector, which is expected to reduce CO2 emissions. The results show that substitution between electricity and non-electricity energy is more likely to occur in northern Japan and less likely to occur in western Japan. However, in northern Japan, the share of energy expenditure in the household budget is larger than in other regions, so encouraging electricity shifts through price effects could be a significant burden, especially for low-income households.