Effects of Human Capital on Energy Consumption: The Role of Income Inequality

Yiping Gao, Rong Yuan () and Shenglin Zheng
Additional contact information
Yiping Gao: School of Economics and Business Management, Chongqing University, Shazhengjie 174, Chongqing 400040, China
Rong Yuan: School of Economics and Business Management, Chongqing University, Shazhengjie 174, Chongqing 400040, China
Shenglin Zheng: School of Economics and Business Management, Chongqing University, Shazhengjie 174, Chongqing 400040, China

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 24, 1-17

Abstract: High-quality human capital (HC) development has a strong influence on achieving a win-win target of economic growth and energy consumption mitigation based on the background of the contemporary “carbon neutrality” constraints in China. We here aim to empirically assess the effect of HC on energy consumption (EC) in 30 provinces of China from 2000 to 2019. Moreover, we broaden the literature by discussing the effect of HC in terms of impact mechanism and nonlinear relationship. Based on methods of the augmented mean group (AMG), the estimation of long-term impacts indicates that the improvement of HC significantly discourages the increase in EC. The intrinsic mechanism shows that the accumulation of HC significantly promotes the decline of EC through economic structure adjustment and technological innovation. Moreover, the threshold model indicates that income equality lifts the inhibitory impact of HC on EC. Accordingly, the development of HC should be involved in the policy preference of China’s provincial and national development strategies considering its effectiveness in stimulating the reduction of energy consumption.

Keywords: human capital; energy consumption; AMG; mediating mechanism; income inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/24/17005/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/24/17005/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:19:y:2022:i:24:p:17005-:d:1007075

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().