Eliminating energy poverty is helpful to get rid of the vicious circle between the lack of adequate and affordable energy services and low income in rural areas. We deconstruct energy poverty into extensive energy poverty and intensive energy poverty and analyze the net effect and its heterogeneity of energy poverty on rural labor wages with micrometric methods, as well as further investigate the impact mechanism from education effect and health effect. The results show that both extensive energy poverty and intensive energy poverty have a significant negative effect on the wages of rural workers, and the marginal effect of extensive energy poverty on the wages of rural workers is lower than that of intensive energy poverty. In addition, the net effect of energy poverty on the wages of rural workers shows labor heterogeneity and regional heterogeneity, and the inhibition effect to low skilled workers and workers with middle wage and in the Western region is the most obvious. Furthermore, energy poverty will limit the access of rural workers to education and damage their health, and then inhibit their productivity and wage. Our results suggest that enhancing the accessibility of energy consumption in rural areas and reducing the incidence of energy poverty are critically essential, and the implementation and optimization of energy poverty alleviation policy should give full consideration to labor force heterogeneity and regional heterogeneity.

The Water-Energy-Food-Ecology (W-E-F-E) nexus is related to the realization of the goal of high-quality economic development in Northwest China. This paper analyzed the dynamic change trend, spatial evolution characteristics, and spatial convergence of identified W-E-F-E nexus in Northwest China utilizing the coupling coordination degree model, an ESDA instrument, and the spatial convergence model. The results show that: first, the W-E-F-E nexus in Northwest China presents a “V” shaped trend of decreasing first and then rising in time dimension. After a decline of 25.1% in 2002–2012, it increased by 29.7% in 2012–2017. Second, the W-E-F-E nexus in Northwest China shows positive spatial autocorrelation, and the Moran’s I index of this is about 0.15. In spatial dimension, it shows a trend of high-value agglomeration around provincial capitals, and the distribution pattern is relatively stable. Thirdly, the W-E-F-E nexus in Northwest China has significant spatial convergence, that is, the W-E-F-E nexus gap between the prefectures in Northwest China is shrinking, and the convergence rate is between 2.83 and 3.16. Moreover, with the development of the economy, the rational allocation of land and labor resources, and the optimization of fiscal expenditure structure, the W-E-F-E nexus in Northwest China will converge to the same steady state level after a long period of time. In general, in the process of improving the W-E-F-E nexus in Northwest China, the heterogeneous characteristics of prefectures should be fully considered, and a trans-regional cooperative management and restriction mechanism of the W-E-F-E nexus should be explored to achieve high-quality development of the region.