Can income inequality reduction policies limit the disparity between urban and rural clean cooking fuel access rates?

Abstract Considering the utmost importance of adopting clean cooking fuels, especially from the viewpoint of partially realizing the targets of the 7th Sustainable Development Goal (SDG‐7), this study appraises how income inequality and other macroeconomic factors impact urban–rural disparities in clean cooking fuel accessibility across 40 developing countries from Sub‐Saharan Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. For analytical purposes, yearly data spanning from 2002 to 2018 is utilized for conducting advanced panel data examinations using methods that are robust against issues of cross‐sectional dependency, slope heterogeneity, and endogeneity. As a whole, the empirical findings reveal that deteriorating income inequality situations widen the gap between urban and rural clean cooking fuel access rates while good institutional quality accounts for lower disparities in urban–rural clean cooking fuel accessibility. Besides, region‐specific findings assure that this disparity is further enhanced by foreign remittances flowing into the selected Sub‐Saharan African nations while institutional quality improvement reduces disparity in the Latin America and the Caribbean countries of concern. Furthermore, the factors influencing the urban–rural disparities in clean cooking fuel accessibility are found to vary across different regional locations and national income‐based classifications of the sampled countries. Accordingly, considering the above findings, some region‐ and income‐group‐specific policy suggestions are put forward for enabling convergence between urban and rural clean fuel access rates across Sub‐Saharan Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean.