An empirical analysis of rural and urban populations’ access to electricity: evidence from Pakistan

Abstract Background This study explores the electricity access to rural and urban populations and its impact on the economic growth in Pakistan. Methods An autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach was applied, and a co-integration test was used to investigate the dynamic causality relationships between the study variables. By using this testing approach, this study filled the literature gap regarding the access of rural and urban population to electricity in Pakistan. Results The tests shed light on the long-run relationship among the variables, whereas the results revealed that the access of both rural and urban populations to electricity had a positive and significant effect on economic growth. Conclusions According to these findings, we can conclude that Pakistan should pay further attention to increasing its electricity production from different sources, including not only hydroelectric, solar, wind, oil, gas, and biomass but also fewer and fewer nuclear sources, in order to fulfill the country’s demands on its way to a future of sustainable development