Household infrastructure expansion without spatial convergence during urbanization: Evidence from Chinese cities

Infrastructure provision underpins basic needs and socioeconomic development, yet systematic city-level evidence on how household infrastructure service provision and its spatial inequalities evolve during the rapid urbanization remains limited. Using official statistics for 295 prefecture-level cities in China from 2006 to 2022, we assess household access to water and energy services. To account for fuel substitution, natural gas and liquefied petroleum gas are treated as substitutable energy carriers, with the higher of their supply rates representing household energy provision. We construct a two-dimensional infrastructure provision index ( IP ), quantify population-weighted inequality across cities and provinces, decompose inequality changes into mean-provision and spatial-dispersion effects, and classify provincial trajectories of within-province inequality. The population-weighted mean IP increased from 0.21 to 0.51, and provision improved in 289 of the 295 cities. Despite this broad expansion, between-city inequality increased from 0.29 to 0.42, while between-province inequality increased from 0.23 to 0.28. Decomposition shows that rising average provision exerted an inequality-reducing effect, but this was more than offset by increasing spatial dispersion. Within-province trajectories were heterogeneous, ranging from decline or reversal to strong increase, with differences primarily associated with the magnitude and timing of dispersion growth. Socioeconomic development and urbanization were positively associated with provision in descriptive comparisons, but these relationships were not stable across panel specifications. These results show that broad improvements in household infrastructure provision do not necessarily lead to spatial convergence, underscoring the need to evaluate both the overall expansion and spatial distribution of infrastructure services.