On 2rd July, 2015, Chun-Bo Ma, Associate Professor of University of Western Australia, visited CEEP-BIT. He gave a talk about “Residential Energy Transition in Rural China” and received a warm welcome. This seminar was hosted by Dr.Yu Hao. Teachers along with students from CEEP-BIT attended this seminar.

　　Dr. Chun-Bo Ma is the Associate Professor of School of Agricultural and Resource Economics, The University of Western Australia. His key research focuses on Chinese energy economics and its electricity market. This report gives the focused analysis about the residential energy transition in rural China.

　　According to 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. However, there is substantial spatial and temporal heterogeneity in residential fuel choices and energy transition towards higher quality fuels across the different regions in rural China. This study analyses residential fuel choice in rural China using a large 8-year panel of over 20,000 households collected by China’s Ministry of Agriculture. Access to energy supply is found to be critical for rural households to transit towards higher quality commercial fuels. There is a significant non-linear income effect in residential energy transition. Evidence in the paper is consistent with Auffhammer and Wolfram (2014), who suggests that income and ownership of household appliances in China also follows a non-linear relationship. The paper also found a significant trend of transition from coal to gas fuels, but not from fuelwood to higher quality fuels.

　　After this seminar, teachers and students from CEEP-BIT had a heated discussion with Assoc.Prof. Chun-Bo Ma, learning more about the data and methodology he used.