A Review of Rural Household Energy Poverty: Identification, Causes and Governance

Abstract

Energy poverty is one of the three major crises of the global energy system. It tends to deepen as a result of the imbalance between supply and demand, energy transition and financial factors, especially in rural areas of developing countries. This paper took rural household energy poverty as the subject and collected 27 Chinese papers and 44 English papers from Google Scholar, Sci-hub, CNKI and other academic websites in the academic field on the definition, identification methods, influencing factors and governance countermeasures of energy poverty. It focused on analyzing the influence of income level, geographic location, urban–rural differences, demographic characteristics and other factors on energy poverty, as well as the profound impact of energy poverty on the population’s health, the population’s economic status, social equity, welfare of the population, the national economic development, etc. It finally landed on the government’s countermeasures to govern energy poverty so as to provide references for solving the problem of energy poverty by systematically sorting out the literature.