Beyond immediate relief: the dynamic effects of targeted poverty alleviation on household electricity consumption

Promoting poverty-stricken households' electricity consumption through poverty-alleviation initiatives is a pivotal pathway to concurrently eradicating income poverty and energy poverty. As a revolutionary approach in governance, China's targeted poverty alleviation (TPA) policy has successfully raised household income, yet its energy-specific impacts across different poverty-alleviation stages remain underexplored for poverty-stricken households. This study examines the energy-poverty-alleviation effect of TPA both during and after households' escape from poverty, using real electricity use data and survey data for 9962 poverty-stricken households from western China in 2016–2022. By applying a difference-in-differences (DID) approach, we find that TPA implementation increased household electricity consumption by 15.06% on average while households were still in poverty. Notably, this effect not only persisted but expanded to 20.87% after households were officially lifted out of poverty. Agricultural and crop-planting subsidies emerged as the dominant drivers of these long-term gains. The results highlight that TPA not only closes the immediate energy gap but also embeds durable electrification behaviors.