The transparency trade-off: Public data openness and energy inequality

Focusing on the nexus between digital governance and energy inequality, this paper examines whether government transparency reforms induced by public data openness improve governance efficiency while simultaneously exacerbating household energy inequality. We ask whether efficiency gains within China's governance system may come at the cost of increasing the vulnerability of households with weaker adaptive capacity, and whether the long-run environmental and governance benefits are sufficient to justify these short-run distributional costs. Drawing on micro-level data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) spanning 2011-2020 and city-level data on the phased rollout of public data platforms, we employ a multi-period difference-in-differences framework to evaluate the impact of public data openness on household energy poverty. We construct a Multidimensional Energy Poverty Index (MEPI) to capture household-level deprivation in energy affordability, energy accessibility, and living environment conditions. The baseline results show that public data openness significantly increases household energy poverty, indicating an adverse impact on energy-related welfare. Heterogeneity analyses show that the adverse effects are concentrated among retired households and residents in cities with stringent environmental mandates, limited resource endowments, or net population outflows, where limited fiscal buffers make it difficult to cushion the regressive shocks associated with digital and green transitions. Mechanism analyses indicate that this effect operates mainly through two channels: enhanced environmental information transparency strengthens informal environmental regulation, while the diversion of governmental attention toward digital governance weakens energy subsidies and infrastructure investment, thereby intensifying the energy burden on vulnerable groups. Additional analyses reveal the dual nature of public data openness: it promotes green transition and governance efficiency while simultaneously reshaping the distribution of social resources. To address these challenges, we propose policy recommendations in three directions: a public data-driven cost-sharing mechanism, an offline proxy network, and a cadre evaluation system prioritizing energy equality.