Digital technology has changed how rural households allocate factors and the environment they make decisions in. Yet, we do not fully understand how digital adoption can lead to a household energy transition. The micro survey data utilized in this study are from the Hundred Villages and Thousand Households project, Jiangxi Province, China. It utilizes ordered probit models and propensity score matching to study the link between digital technology adoption and the intensity of rural households' clean energy consumption. The estimates show a positive and statistically significant association, and the matching results remain consistent after adjusting for observable differences between adopters and non-adopters. Mechanism analyses suggest two pathways. Digital adoption is associated with a higher non-farm employment share, consistent with higher time opportunity costs of collecting traditional fuels and improved budget capacity, and with stronger social capital, consistent with stronger peer influence and lower transaction frictions in adopting clean energy. The association is strongest for cooking energy, followed by space heating, and weakest for water heating. In addition, information acquisition use is more strongly associated with clean energy consumption than social entertainment use. These findings suggest that narrowing gaps in digital access and effective use may complement efforts to accelerate rural household clean energy transitions in China.
Wang et al. (Thu,) studied this question.