Recent energy price rises hit low-income households disproportionately with Government supports only offsetting part of the impact, a new report from the Economic and Social Research Institute has found.<\/p>\n
The study said lower-income households spend a larger proportion of their income on energy, particularly on home heating oil, petrol and diesel.<\/p>\n
It said increases in fuel and heating costs placed a heavier financial burden on the less well off.<\/p>\n
In March and April the Government reduced excise on fuel, suspended the National Oil Reserve Agency levy, extended the fuel allowance and deferred an increase in the Carbon Tax.<\/p>\n
The ESRI said that these measures reduced the immediate cost by half.<\/p>\n
But it said it did not offset the “regressive nature of energy inflation”.<\/p>\n
Dr Claire Keane, associate research professor at the ESRI, said: “While recent policy measures help to cushion the shock, their largely untargeted nature means that a significant share of the support goes to higher-income households.”<\/p>\n
She added: “More targeted measures could better protect vulnerable groups at a lower cost.”<\/p>\n
The report said that without the Government’s cost-of-living package, low-income households would have faced an energy prices rises which would have been the equivalent to 3% of their household income.<\/p>\n
But high-income households would have faced an energy price increase of 1% of household income.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Recent energy price rises hit low-income households disproportionately with Government supports only offsetting part of the impact, a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":423322,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[72,113,61,60],"class_list":["post-495236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/495236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=495236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/495236\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/423322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=495236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=495236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=495236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}