Air Pollution and Energy Poverty: Evidence From Chinese Households
Xue Li,
Russell Smyth and
Yao Yao
The Energy Journal, 2024, vol. 45, issue 6, 1-36
Abstract:
We estimate the causal effect of air pollution on energy poverty using Chinese panel data. Exploiting exogeneous variations in PM 2.5 concentrations due to atmospheric thermal inversions to proxy air pollution, we find that poor air quality increases energy poverty at both the intensive and extensive margins. Specifically, we find that a one-standard-deviation increase in PM 2.5 concentrations (22.06 μg/m 3 ) increases the share of income spent on energy by 1.01 percentage points, accounting for 15.71 percent of the income share that a representative Chinese household spends on energy. The probability of being into energy poverty, in response to the same change, increases by 4.19 to 8.38 percentage points, which corresponds to a 22.57 to 34.01 percent increase in the proportion of households in energy poverty evaluated at the mean. Our results are robust to numerous checks. We find that the channels through which air pollution causes energy poverty are via people spending more time indoors, air pollution impairing health, and air pollution having an adverse effect on household income. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that reducing PM 2.5 emissions to the annual standard of 35 μg/m 3 , which is mandated by the central government, would lift 9.30 to 18.59 million households out of energy poverty. JEL Classification: I32; O13; Q53; R20
Keywords: air pollution; energy poverty; household panel; health; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01956574241280797 (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:sae:enejou:v:45:y:2024:i:6:p:1-36
DOI: 10.1177/01956574241280797
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in The Energy Journal
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().