Does Energy Poverty Reduce Rural Labor Wages? Evidence From China’s Rural Household Survey

Wei-Ping Wu,Si-Wen Gong,Zi-Gui Chen,Wei-Kang Zeng

doi:10.3389/fenrg.2021.670026

Abstract

Eliminating energy poverty is helpful to get rid of the vicious circle between the lack of adequate and affordable energy services and low income in rural areas. We deconstruct energy poverty into extensive energy poverty and intensive energy poverty and analyze the net effect and its heterogeneity of energy poverty on rural labor wages with micrometric methods, as well as further investigate the impact mechanism from education effect and health effect. The results show that both extensive energy poverty and intensive energy poverty have a significant negative effect on the wages of rural workers, and the marginal effect of extensive energy poverty on the wages of rural workers is lower than that of intensive energy poverty. In addition, the net effect of energy poverty on the wages of rural workers shows labor heterogeneity and regional heterogeneity, and the inhibition effect to low skilled workers and workers with middle wage and in the Western region is the most obvious. Furthermore, energy poverty will limit the access of rural workers to education and damage their health, and then inhibit their productivity and wage. Our results suggest that enhancing the accessibility of energy consumption in rural areas and reducing the incidence of energy poverty are critically essential, and the implementation and optimization of energy poverty alleviation policy should give full consideration to labor force heterogeneity and regional heterogeneity.

Highlights

Energy poverty is one of the three major challenges facing the energy system of the world and an important symbol of poverty in developing countries, which has been plagued by the development of some countries and regions (Che et al, 2021)
The net effect of extensive energy poverty on rural labor wages is reported in columns 1–3, and the net effect of intensive energy poverty on rural labor wages is reported in columns 4– 6
The estimated coefficients of extensive energy poverty in central and western regions are −0.15 and −0.41, and the estimated coefficients of intensive energy poverty in central and western regions are −0.29 and −0.40, respectively. This means that the restraining effect of extensive energy poverty and intensive energy poverty on the wages of rural workers is more prominent in the western regions

Summary

Introduction

Energy poverty is one of the three major challenges facing the energy system of the world and an important symbol of poverty in developing countries, which has been plagued by the development of some countries and regions (Che et al, 2021). The energy structure of rural households based on fossil energy and traditional biomass energy has not been broken. Energy poverty has widened the life quality gap among residents of different income classes and become a “stumbling block” for low-income rural families to pursue a happy life. According to the National Bureau of Statistics of China, the per capita disposable income of rural households in 2019 was 16,020.7 yuan, which is only 37.8% of the per capita disposable income of urban residents. The housing expenditure of rural households (including water, electricity, gas, and heating expenditure) was 2,871.3 yuan, which is only 42.3% of the housing expenditure of urban residents. Rural household energy supply is insufficient, and the utilization structure is unreasonable, which make it difficult to get rid of the low-income dilemma

Methods

Results

Conclusion