Conference Agenda

As China undergoes rapid demographic aging alongside a nationwide energy transition, elderly empty-nest households, particularly those in rural areas with limited income sources, may face growing challenges in maintaining affordable access to modern energy. Yet existing studies often treat the elderly as a homogeneous group, overlooking within-group disparities. Drawing on five waves of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (2011-2020), this study classifies households into empty-nest, mixed-age, and younger categories to examine patterns of energy burden, with a focus on urban-rural and regional heterogeneity. Using a two-way fixed-effects model, the analysis finds that elderly empty-nest households face an average energy burden 2.6 percentage points higher than other household types (p < 0.01), with gaps of 2.0 percentage points in urban areas (p < 0.01) and 3.1 percentage points (p < 0.01) in rural areas. Across climate zones, the energy burden of elderly empty-nest households is higher than that of other age groups in the cold, hot-summer–cold-winter, and hot-summer–warm-winter zones, while no notable difference is observed in the severely cold and temperate zones. A Shapley decomposition is used to assess the relative contribution of explanatory variables and indicates that empty-nest status accounts for the largest share of observed variation in energy burden. To further investigate underlying mechanisms, two alternative definitions of energy burden are compared, one based on the ratio of energy expenditure to household income and the other on the ratio of energy expenditure to total household expenditure. Results suggest that the income-based measure primarily reflects affordability constraints in rural areas, whereas the expenditure-based measure captures consumption rigidity in modern energy use in urban households. These findings underscore the importance of recognizing intra-elderly heterogeneity in energy-related policy.