Empirical analysis of rural household energy consumption in China

Abstract

Rural household energy consumption in China influences people's living conditions, environmental issues and economic development. So it is worthwhile to study the rural household energy consumption and its developmental propensity in rural China. In this paper, we analyse the characteristics of energy consumption and how it changes over time. Panel data regression method is used to analyse the factors which influence energy consumption, along with differences among three regions in China. The result shows that rural household energy consumption is closely related to urbanisation and historical periods of energy consumption. If there is a 1% increase in both urbanisation and energy consumption in the previous period, then current energy consumption will increase 0.74?0.92% and 0.25?0.60% respectively.