The Effect of Non-agricultural Employment on Household Energy Consumption

With the sustainable development of economic, the continuous improvement of farms’ living standards, energy consumption level and consumption structure changed a lot in rural China. At the same time, people pay more and more attention to rural energy consumption. Because rural energy problem not only relate to coordinated and sustainable developmet on China energy, society, economic and environment, but also influence rural economic development and rural construction. Meanwile, non-agricultural employment became increasingly important. Non-agricultural employment makes household more income and change labor force allocation structure. So the rural energy consumption changed with it. There are a lot of articles which analysis of influencing factors on rural energy consumption. But it is less to analysis on rural energy consumption from view of non-agricultural employment.Based on the backaround, the paper chose economically developed region within Jiangsu Province, Taihu Lake area for study area. The paper analyse three aspects:how farmers chose living energy consumption, the factors that effect farmers energy consumption, the factors that effect rural energy consumption structure.The paper consists of five charpters. Charpter one is the introduction. In this chapter illuminates the research background, purpose and significance of the paper. Charpter two is literature review, which overviews the domestic and international energy related research in rural areas, and makes discussion and summarization. Charpter three introduced the rural energy consumption situation in the Taihu Lake Basin, Jiangsu Province, and make a comparison with that in China and Jiangsu Province. In this chapter, the result shows that traditional biomass energy still plays an important role in rural household energy and most households use "straw+gas+electricity" in the research region. Charpter four amalyzes the empirical models and explain the variable factors. According to the character of rural energy consumption in study region, paper chooses Ologit Model and Tobit Model and General Multivariate Regression to analyse rural energy consumption choose, rural energy consumption level and rural energy condumption structure. This chapter also analysed the result of models. Results show that non-agricultural employment income, off-farm people and household characters and region variable all influence the rural energy consumption. Charpter five is the conclution and suggestion. It is necessary to improve the rural employ market in order to promote the change of rural energy consumption. Another suggestion is to increase the input in technology in order to use the energy efficiently.