Elsevier

Energy

Volume 182, 1 September 2019, Pages 814-823
Energy

Rural household energy consumption characteristics and determinants in China

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2019.06.048Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Use a national survey data of 2015 on rural household energy consumption of China.

  • Display comprehensive characteristics of rural household energy consumption.

  • Comprehensively examine the factors affecting rural household energy consumption.

Abstract

For a developing country with a large rural population, to understand the rural households' energy consumption characteristic and energy consumption determinants for further public policy design is of increasing importance. Therefore, this paper provides a detailed analysis of the characteristics of rural households’ energy consumption. Simultaneously, based on the data of 1472 rural households from the Chinese General Social Survey of 2015, the energy consumption determinants of rural households are estimated by Tobit model. Results reveal that rural households with a healthy and old household head reduce the share of coal consumption, and household labors with an off-farm job and high level of education, and a large household size increase the share of LPG and electricity consumption. The good economic condition of rural households contributes to the reduction of biomass consumption. Given the results, the government should work for poverty reduction, subsidies for modern equipment purchase, policies of effective and renewable energy technologies, and educational investment in rural areas, which may help for a positive transition in energy consumption for rural households.

Introduction

The changes in economic development, the process of urbanization, living standards, and climate have made great contributions to the variation in household energy consumption [1]. Especially in developing countries, rural household energy consumption accounts for a significant proportion of total energy consumption of a country. Moreover, tradition fuels, including agricultural and animal waste, fuelwood, and coal play a dominant role in household energy consumption in the rural area of these countries. For example, 92% of households use biomass in the disregarded villages of Bangladesh [2]; fuelwood is the major energy form in Nepal, accounting for 76.20% of the total energy consumption [3]; biomass energy (natural organic fuels) constitutes a high proportion of total national energy use for rural African [4]. Excessive use of biomass energy lead to environment degeneration [5] and emitting of several air pollutants [6]. Moreover, the increasing use of coal also has a negative impact on the rural environment, because the coal combustion plays a vital role in the carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, and total suspended particulates emissions [7]. Therefore, rural households face a series of considerable, inter-locking challenges in the coming transition to a low-carbon energy system with the requirement of reducing emission as well as the use of clean and renewable energy [8].

Similar to most of the developing countries, biomass also accounts for a large share of total energy supply (61.4%) and is the type of fuel most commonly used in rural China [9]. As the largest developing country with about 577 million people living in rural areas at the end of 2017, accounting for 41.5% of the total Chinese population [10], understanding the ways of energy use of rural households in China will be of increasing importance [11]. Hence, an increasing number of studies have focused on energy consumption in rural China. Early studies mainly presented the characteristics of rural household energy consumption in China through descriptive statistics [[12], [13], [14]], then with the available data based on household level, an increasing number of scholars drew their attention to analyze factors affecting energy consumption in rural China based on various empirical approaches and datasets. For instance, evidence from three villages in Jiangxi province reflected the relationship between labor input into fuelwood collection and energy decision of rural households by a household model [15], and the relationship between off-farm employment and energy decision by a village-level CGE-model [16]. A case study of 533 rural households from Yunnan province estimated the impact of Collective Forest Tenure Reform in China on rural household energy consumption [17]. The influence of off-farm income on rural household energy expenditures was examined by the data of 493 rural households from rural Gansu, Henan and Shandong provinces [18]. Additionally, some literature explained the impact of socio-economic transition on the inequality of energy use in urban and rural residents in China [19], rural households energy transition [20], rural household energy sustainable development [21] according to the province-level panel data of China.

In our review of previous literature, we found that different rural household surveys have been conducted in various regions to address the theme of rural household energy consumption. However, various regions are characterized by the different climate, natural resources, the density of population, lifestyles and so on, which means that there are regional variances and the representativeness of survey data is limited. Moreover, some energy consumption data collected in an early period in previous studies [14,22,23] may fail to reflect the changes in the external environment and its effects on rural household energy consumption in recent years. This is because great achievements exists in the China's rural energy reform in the last decade such as the improvement of energy commercialization, overall update of the energy use infrastructures (7.7 billion Yuan of investments in 2012), 100% of the power-connection rate, and 100% of electricity access rate (by 2015) in rural areas [24]. Though some studies explored the characteristics of rural household energy consumption by using a large sample of 1440 households in 8 typical counties of 8 China's economic zones [25], or a sample of 6000 rural households in 30 rural counties in 25 provinces in China in 2010 [26], which increased the sampling representativeness and explanatory power in the research, they lacked of empirical analysis of rural households' choice and decision of energy consumption. Otherwise, apart from the choice of cooking fuel [27], main of the empirical literature focused on a particular energy source, such as straw [28], firewood [29], biogas [30,31], while few of them considered the rural households' decision of energy consumption.

Therefore, this paper attempts to describe the characteristics of rural household energy consumption in detail and examine the factors affecting their energy consumption in rural China. It is worth noting that there are many choices to be made for rural household daily energy use, such as cooking, lighting, and appliances. There are numerous factors that influence their choices, including socio-economic and cultural factors [27], household characteristic [32], price and reliability in the supply of fuels [33], dwelling attributes [34], etc. Hence, following the previous literature, this paper provides an empirical analysis of household energy consumption by taking household socio-economic characteristics and dwelling characteristics into account.

This paper distinguished from previous studies in various ways. First, we use a new comprehensive survey data on rural household energy consumption covering 478 villages in 22 provinces, 4 autonomous regions, and 4 municipalities of China, which can help to well reflect the characteristics of current energy use by rural households in China. Second, we display the detailed and more comprehensive characteristics of rural household energy consumption with this dataset. Third, other than previous studies which only analyzed rural households' energy choices,.this paper uses the Tobit model to examine the factors affecting the share of a rural household's consumption of five main sources of energy to total energy consumption (including coal, liquefied petroleum gas, natural gas, biomass, and electricity). If the household did not use an energy source, the measure of this energy use was censored at zero. In this case, the common least squares regression will generate inconsistent parameter estimates, while the Tobit model is appreciated for the censored data and can consistently estimate the model parameters [35]. Since rural households usually use a variety of energy sources to meet their life energy requirement and rarely dependent on a particular fuel, the explanation of rural household energy consumption intensity is more important from a policy standpoint.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces the data and general feature of rural household energy consumption in China. In section 3, we briefly describe the methodology. Section 4 presents the results and discussion. Section 5 concludes with a summary and suggestions.

Section snippets

Data

Data from the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) of 2015 conducted by Science and Technology of Renmin University and Hong Kong University, which covered 478 villages in 22 provinces, 4 autonomous regions, and 4 municipalities of China.1 About 10,968 rural households were selected through the procedure of the multi-step stratified random sampling, and detailed information about socioeconomic

Methodology

One of the purposes of this study is to analyze the determinants of rural household energy consumption in China. Though rural households consume various energy sources simultaneously, this study mainly focuses on five categories of energy sources which account for over 90% of rural households' total energy consumption. Therefore, this study considers the share of the amount of each type of energy for a rural household and set the share to five dependent variables, including the share of the

Results and discussion

Table 6 reports the Tobit regression results for the share of five energy sources consumption. We extend these results to marginal effects (MEs) and robust standard errors. Table 7 presents the results of the variance inflation factors (VIFs) for the independent variables in the Tobit model. The mean VIF equals to 2.19 and the VIFs of all the independent variables used in the Tobit model are below 7, suggesting that the correlation among these variables is weak, and thereby there is not a

Conclusions

This study provides the details of characteristics of rural household energy consumption by using a new comprehensive survey data of 1472 rural households collected by the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) on rural household energy consumption of China in 2015. Furthermore, we analyze factors affecting the share of rural household energy consumption (including coal, liquefied petroleum gas, natural gas, biomass, and electricity) in China. We find that the most prevalent energy source is

Declaration of interests

  • The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

  • The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests.

Acknowledgment

The authors acknowledge support from the key policy research project of National Natural Science Foundation of China: “Land Titling: Realistic Background, Policy Objectives and Effect Evaluation” (No. 71742003) and National natural science foundation of China youth program (No. 71703041).

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