Environmental regulations, clean energy access, and household energy poverty: Evidence from China

Abstract

This paper examines the effect of environmental regulations on energy poverty and analyses whether clean energy access, the access to modern energy services, is an important channel through which environmental regulations affect energy poverty in China. Using household-level survey data in China from 2012 to 2018, we find that enacting tightened environmental regulations leads to greater affordability problems for households using non-clean energy and deepens the degree of their energy poverty. Furthermore, we show that capable or sufficient access to clean energy enables households to obtain clean energy at a lower price, thus reducing the adverse effect of environmental regulations on household energy poverty. Our results have important implications for environmental and energy policy makers.