China’s Urbanization And Urban-rural Electricity Consumption Inequality

In the past 40 years of reform and opening up,the contradiction between the people’s growing needs for a better life and unbalanced and inadequate development has become the main social contradiction.For a long time,the imbalance of urban and rural ecological development is one of the main contradictions.Among them,the imbalance of power consumption between urban and rural areas is more prominent.According to the 2016 statistics of the National Bureau of statistics,the energy consumption of poor rural households accounts for 40%,accounting for less than 20%of the national energy consumption;by 2017,there were more than 200000 people without electricity in remote rural areas such as Sichuan,Qinghai,Gansu and Tibet.At the same time,China’s rapid urbanization process has brought far-reaching impact on the power imbalance between urban and rural areas.Some theoretical research points out that with the improvement of urbanization rate,the characteristics of energy consumption of residents will change greatly,and the power consumption of urban and rural areas will be impacted by urbanization.As one of the important modern energy varieties,electric power is a relatively clean modern living energy,which is gradually becoming the necessary living energy to meet the needs of human survival and development,and also the energy variety that human beings will consume for a long time.Therefore,the problem of modern power consumption inequality is related to people’s livelihood and needs to be paid enough attention by the society.However,for a long time,the problem of power consumption inequality in China has only remained at the level of measurement.Most of the relevant studies measure the level of national energy consumption inequality through Gini coefficient,Theil index,Atkinson index and other methods,and focus on measuring the overall level of inequality,lack of research on Urban-Rural Inequality in each province.At the same time,there has been a lack of empirical research on the causes of the inequality of energy consumption,including electricity,and the generation mechanism of the inequality of power consumption in urban and rural areas in China has not been solved.In addition,there are few studies focusing on the relationship between urbanization and the inequality of power consumption in urban and rural areas from the perspective of empirical research,most of which are descriptive qualitative analysis.In recent years,a large number of domestic and foreign scholars use the stochastic regression influence model(STIRPAT)to study the impact of social and economic development on environmental pressure,and decompose the factors that affect environmental pressure into population(P),affluence(a),technology(T)and other socioeconomic factors.Based on an extended STIRPAT model,this paper regards the inequality of urban and rural power consumption as an environmental pressure,and de-composes it into urbanization rate,the inequality of urban and rural per capita income and other socio-economic factors.At the same time,considering the "U-shaped" impact of urbanization rate on environmental pressure(carbon emission,electricity consumption,energy consumption,etc.),this paper introduces the city second term of urbanization studies whether there is a nonlinear relationship between urbanization and urban-rural power consumption inequality.Because there may be a two-way causal relationship between environmental performance and its influencing factors,in order to solve this potential endogenous problem,many scholars use GMM to explore the relationship between environmental performance and its influencing factors.In this paper,the first-order difference GMM and System GMM models are used to explore the impact of urbanization and other socioeconomic factors on urban and rural power consumption inequality.In order to test the accuracy and robustness of GMM estimation,the paper compares the estimation results of mixed regression(POLS),fixed effect model(FE)and GMM,and finds that the symbols of the estimation coefficients of different models are consistent and the sizes are relatively close Recently,it is verified that GMM model is robust to explore the power inequality between urban and rural areas.The regression results show that there is a"U-shaped" relationship between urbanization and power inequality between urban and rural areas.With the advancement of urbanization,the degree of power consumption inequality between urban and rural areas presents a trend of first decreasing and then rising,and the turning point appears in the period when the urbanization rate is about 60%.In order to further investigate the robustness of empirical research,this paper also verifies the robustness of the conclusions of this paper by four methods:replacing the explanatory variables,core explanatory variables,sub sample regression and adding other explanatory variables.In addition,considering the significant impact of the regional economic development level and the differences of human regional characteristics on the energy consumption of residents,this paper further studies the heterogeneity.According to the differences of regional economic development,30 provinces and cities are divided into developed eastern and relatively backward central and western regions.According to the differences of regional cultural characteristics,30 provinces and cities are divided into southern and northern regions.At the same time,considering that the classification regression will lose some effective information,this paper adopts the variable coefficient model with individual influence,that is,assuming that the coefficients of the explanatory variables in the original regression model change with the regional differences,it is found that the developed eastern region has surpassed the inflection point of the U-type relationship,the central and western regions are still in the stage of rapid decline of urban-rural power imbalance with urbanization,and the southern region is in the U-type relationship.The inflection point of the southern region is earlier than that of the northern region.Finally,this paper analyzes the U-shaped relationship between urbanization and urban-rural power consumption inequality.From the perspective of rural and urban power consumption,the impact of urbanization is divided into scale effect and efficiency effect.It is found that before the U-shaped turning point of urbanization and urban-rural power consumption inequality,the scale effect,especially in rural areas,plays a leading role.Rural power consumption is affected by the scale effect,which increases rapidly,and urban-rural power consumption inequality decreases gradually.In the later stage of urbanization,that is beyond the inflection point,rural power consumption continues to increase with the scale effect and efficiency effect of urbanization,while urban areas are mainly restrained by the efficiency effect,and the growth rate of power consumption is slower than that of rural areas,so that the rural power consumption is anti super urban,and the urban and rural power consumption inequality is reversed.