Environmental regulation, energy poverty and social welfare: Based on China's provincial panel data

Alleviating energy poverty, improving the ecological environment, and promoting social welfare have become important issues in society. By taking panel data from 30 provinces in China from 2003 to 2020 as the research object, fixed effects models and system-GMM models are adopted, and the impacts of environmental regulations on social welfare and the moderating effect of energy poverty are studied in this paper. The results show that enhanced environmental regulation has a significant negative impact on social welfare, while flexible environmental regulation has the opposite, especially in energy poverty regions. Moreover, energy poverty has a significant negative impact on social welfare, and energy poverty reduces the consumption capacity of clean energy, which may pollute the environment and damage health, thus reducing social welfare. Additionally, the energy poverty has significant positive moderating effect, that is, energy poverty aggravates the inhibitory effect of enhanced environmental regulation on social welfare, and promotes the impact of flexible environmental regulation on social welfare. Finally, energy poverty varies significantly in different regions, and the energy poverty lines in the eastern, central and western regions, as well as the national are 503.381, 442.758, 359.461 and 444.546, respectively. •Enhanced environmental regulation has a significant negative impact on social welfare.•Flexible environmental regulation has a significant positive impact on social welfare.•The fixed effect and system-GMM models are used for analysis.•Energy poverty reduces the consumption capacity of clean energy.•Energy poverty has significant positive moderating effect.