Does energy transition help narrow the urban-rural income gap? Evidence from China

With climate change and inequality concerns being the twofold challenge for societies, vigorously facilitating the pace of energy transition in parallel to promoting social justice is addressed by global societies. Using an empirical analysis of 30 provinces in China, we examine how the pace of multi-dimension energy transition influences urban-rural income gap. It starts from an assessment of China's energy transition performance by constructing a comprehensive index framework. Then we investigate the impacts of the energy transition on the urban-rural income gap by employing panel data of China's 30 provinces from 2008 to 2019. Our results demonstrate a significant upward trend in China's overall energy transition performance. Meanwhile, this paper highlights the positive but heterogenous contributions of the energy transition to narrowing the urban-rural income gap. We also gauge the positive moderating effects of energy transition and various targeted transition policies and environmental factors on the urban-rural income gap in China, such as the clean heating and PV-based poverty alleviation project; but the negative effect of coal phaseout policy cannot be ignored. Our findings in the context of urban-rural income inequality in China provide practical insights and pertinent policy implications to deepen understanding of the global just energy transition.