On May 16, 2017, A.Prof. Chunbo Ma from The University of Western Australia (UWA) gave a report entitled " Residential Energy Transition in Rural China: the Role of Fuel Availability, Accessibility, Affordability and Applicability" at CEEP, BIT. The report was hosted by Prof. Hua Liao, some other teachers and students attended the report.
Solid fuels (coal and fuelwood) are still widely used by over 400 million people in rural China, which brings severe health, local as well as global environmental consequences. A sound understanding of the energy transition pattern of rural households will provide valuable insights for policy makers aiming to facilitate transition towards sustainable energy consumption. In this lecture, professor Ma present a study using the large longitudinal household panel data drawn from the National Rural Fixed Point Survey (2004-2011) collected by the Ministry of Agriculture, to investigates residential fuel choice in rural China. Using a carefully selected set of proxy variables, they found that fuel availability, accessibility, affordability and applicability play important roles in determining household choices of cooking fuels in rural China. The results are also robust to alternative model specifications.
Chunbo Ma is graduated from Nankai University as undergraduate and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for Master and Ph.D. He was employed as Research Fellow at the University of Michigan in 2007 and an Assistant Professor at the University of Western Australia (UWA) in 2009. He was tenured in 2012 and later promoted to Associated Professor in 2014. He is interested in Environmental, Energy and Agricultural Economy, and many works had been published in journals such as Environmental and Resource Economics, Resource and Energy Economics, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, and Energy Journal.