Impacts of targeted poverty alleviation on urban-rural residential energy consumption inequality: Evidence from 178 Chinese prefecture-level cities

China's targeted poverty alleviation (TPA) policy is a revolutionary approach to poverty gover-nance with profound implications for eliminating poverty in rural areas. However, previous studies did not explore whether the TPA policy can reduce energy consumption inequality be-tween urban and rural residents (UREI). Therefore, our study aims to investigate the impact of the TPA policy on UREI. We first construct UREI estimates for 178 prefecture-level cities in China covering the period from 2010 to 2020 using the Theil index. We then apply the difference -in-differences (DID) method to examine how the TPA policy affects UREI. Our empirical results confirm that the implementation of the TPA policy can significantly reduce UREI by 0.8%. Moreover, our dynamic effect analysis shows that the TPA policy has a lag effect on UREI that progressively deepens over time. Our heterogeneity analysis further indicates that the TPA policy has a significantly negative impact on UREI in the coastal region, while it has a significantly positive impact in the inland region. Based on these findings, we highlight several relevant policy implications for the Chinese government to enhance the benefits of rural-oriented policies in reducing UREI during the rural revitalization process.