Food-related energy consumption can help reveal poverty in rural Chinese households
Ruohan Zhong, Jinjun Xue, Xinye Zheng, Chu Wei, Qian Sun · 2026
Read Food-related energy consumption can help reveal poverty in rural Chinese households by Ruohan Zhong, Jinjun Xue, Xinye Zheng, Chu Wei, Qian Sun (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13518868.txt.
Description
Ruohan Zhong and four colleagues propose in 2026 a poverty clue hidden in cooking energy: the share of a household's energy spent preparing food. Money-based measures miss families who farm for themselves or trade without cash. Engel's law says poorer households devote a larger share of resources to basic needs.
Using a nationwide Chinese household survey, the team built an Energy Engel Coefficient and checked it against regional patterns, subjective experience, and asset ownership. The new measure followed Engel's law more faithfully than the classic spending version. It flagged 13.9 percent of households as poor, and 85.8 percent of those were missed by the traditional coefficient, mostly small low-income rural homes.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Ruohan Zhong, Jinjun Xue, Xinye Zheng, Chu Wei, Qian Sun |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 66 KB |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |