Ownership and usage of air conditioners (AC) have increased dramatically in the past few decades as global warming and the increasing occurrence of extreme hot weather have become major concerns. However, there is a lack of household-level studies on the effect of climate change on AC energy consumption and usage patterns, especially for developing countries, which have great potential for AC adoption and usage.

There is an ongoing reform in coal taxation in China, from a quantity-based to a price-based approach. While the coal tax could play an important role in resource conservation and air pollution reduction, its distributional effect is not well studied. This paper investigates the distributional effect of China's coal taxes on households before and after the reform. We find that about 30 percent of rural households and six percent of urban households are directly affected by the coal taxes, and that the directly affected households tend to be poor.

Every year after the rice harvest, some 2.5 million farmers in northwest India burn the remaining stubble to prepare their fields for the subsequent wheat crop. Crop residue burning causes massive air pollution affecting millions of people across the Indo-Gangetic Plains. We examine different tillage practices to provide urgently needed empirical evidence on how profitable it is for farmers to adopt no-burn technologies, especially the ‘Happy Seeder’ (HS) which is capable of sowing wheat directly into large amounts of crop residue.

Until recently, women have not been seen as having the potential for entrepreneurial success. Yet women’s engagement in the energy sector could substantially improve energy access for those most underserved. This article examines the role of women as energy entrepreneurs from the perspective of gender inequality within the energy industry.

Over 1.3bn people worldwide lack access to modern energy. In Africa alone 600m remain off-grid, 400m live in extreme poverty, and both numbers are expected to grow since grid expansion and economic growth are not predicted to keep pace with population growth. In addition, almost 6 million children under 5 die each year from preventable diseases, preliminary research suggesting that the primary causes are respiratory infections, and smoke from traditional lighting.

Vietnam’s electricity consumption has increased more than 20 times over the last 3 decades. As a consequence of the low energy price policy, the demand for electricity in both the residential and industrial sectors has risen at twice the rate of annual economic growth. Thus, there is an urgent need to characterize the properties of this demand and its determinants. This study presents a first household-level estimate of the demand for residential electricity in Vietnam using a 2015 World Bank household registration survey.

We investigate the relationship between China's macroeconomic performance and the world oil market over the past two decades. Unlike existing studies, we allow for possible regime changes by utilizing a class of Markov-switching vector autoregression (MS-VAR) models. The model identifies key regime changes in the structural shocks when the oil market experiences low and high volatility. We find that demand shocks from China and the rest of the world have a larger impact on the real price of crude oil during periods of high volatility.

Asia is facing serious environmental challenges including urban air pollution and the effects of global climate change. As a major source of greenhouse gases, what happens in Asia will play a crucial role in determining the extent to which the world warms over coming decades. This paper reviews key environmental challenges faced by the region and the growing opportunities for a transition to a cleaner economy powered by zero‐emission energy sources.

Vietnam experienced a solar photovoltaic (PV) installation boom in the first half of 2019, with installed capacity increasing to 4,450 MW. This saw Vietnam overtake Thailand to have the largest installed solar PV capacity in Southeast Asia. This paper investigates the underlying drivers of Vietnam's solar boom, barriers to further solar adoption, and suitable strategies for the next stage of solar adoption.