Fuel choices for cooking in China: Analysis based on multinomial logit model

Hua Liao*, Tianqi Chen, Xin Tang, Jingwen Wu

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    78 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    Ensuring household access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all the people is one of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). China has achieved 100% electricity access, while the traditional solid fuels such as firewood are still widely used in its rural area. This paper, using a long-term and large micro dataset and multinomial logit model, investigates quantitatively the determinants of cooking fuel choice in rural China. The results show that in addition to the previous knowledge on household income, occupation is crucial to the cooking fuel transition. In average, if the head of household changes its occupation from farm to non-farm, the possibility of using firewood would reduce by around 14–21%. The impact of income is slightly small. A 10% increase in income may result in 0.5% of possibility of firewood use. These conclusions are robust after considering the possible energy ladders using ordered logit regressions (OLR) and generalized OLR. After controlling other factors such as income and occupation, we have not found concrete evidence on the influences of education and gender of the household head and household member numbers. To accelerate the fuel transition, in addition to increase the household income, the government should pay attention to create more non-farm work opportunities for the rural.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)104-111
    Number of pages8
    JournalJournal of Cleaner Production
    Volume225
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 10 Jul 2019

    Keywords

    • Cooking fuel choice
    • Energy transition
    • Multinomial logit
    • Rural China

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