Enhancing clean cooking energy transition through living facility improvements: Experience from China

Facilitating the transition of households to cleaner, low-carbon energy not only supports carbon neutrality but also promotes public health and social equity. While most research on carbon neutrality has primarily focused on the industrial sector, limited attention has been given to households, particularly in rural areas. This paper examines the impact of public investment programs aimed at improving living facilities (LFI) on the energy transition of rural households in China, utilizing a panel dataset of 769 villages from 2014 to 2020. A staggered difference-in-differences approach is employed to identify the causal effects of these programs, with public investments treated as a quasi-natural experiment. The results indicate that the LFI programs accounted for approximately 33.4 % of the transition to clean cooking energy among households in impoverished villages during the study period, with road construction and housing renovations having a particularly strong impact. This transition was largely driven by improved access to clean energy sources and increased household incomes. These findings highlight the critical role of public investment programs in facilitating the transition of rural households to cleaner energy in developing countries, offering valuable insights for policy design in similar contexts.