Are Chinese Green Transport Policies Effective? A New Perspective from Direct Pollution Rebound Effect, and Empirical Evidence From the Road Transport Sector

Abstract

Air pollution has become a serious challenge in China. Emissions from motor vehicles have been found to be one main sources of air pollution. Although the Chinese government has undertaken numerous green policies to mitigate harmful emissions from road transport sector, it is still uncertain for both policy makers and researchers to know whether the policies are effective in the short and long terms. We propose a new concept of "pollution rebound effect" (PRE) to estimate the effectiveness of green traffic policies. We estimate direct air PRE as a measure of the effectiveness of the policies of reducing air pollution from the transport sector based on time-series data from the period 1986-2014. We find that the short-term direct air PRE is −0.4105, and the corresponding long-run PRE is −0.246. The negative results indicate that the direct air PRE does not exist in the road passenger transport sector in China, both in the short term and in the long term during the period 1986-2014. This implies that the Chinese green transport policies are effective in terms of harmful emissions reduction in the transport sector. This research, to the best of our knowledge, is the first attempt to quantify the effectiveness of the green transport policies in the transitional period that China is currently undergoing.

Can Green Traffic Policies Affect Air Quality? Evidence from A Difference-in-Difference Estimation in China

“…However, to the best of our knowledge, most attempts fail to estimate green traffic policies in China. According to our previous study, we evaluate the effectiveness of transport policies on decreasing pollutants emission using a new concept of "pollution rebound effect" [18]. The findings show that the Chinese green traffic policies as a whole are effective in terms of harmful emissions reduction during the period 1986-2014.…”

A Review of Low-Carbon Transformation and Energy Innovation Issues in China

“…Most papers in this special issue show great interest in the effectiveness of environmental policy [1,2] and pollution emissions [3,4,6,7]. Some of these studies use a conventional regression method to analyze the impacts of green transport policy [2] and low-carbon innovation [3], but the downside of this method is that conventional regressions cannot test and analyze the efficiency of inter-regional industrial systems, or specifically to identify the reasons for the ineffectiveness of a particular industrial system.…”

“…Some of these studies use a conventional regression method to analyze the impacts of green transport policy [2] and low-carbon innovation [3], but the downside of this method is that conventional regressions cannot test and analyze the efficiency of inter-regional industrial systems, or specifically to identify the reasons for the ineffectiveness of a particular industrial system. Therefore, the environmental efficiency evaluation based on DEA has been widely favored by environmental economists, due to its unique advantages in the efficiency evaluation for homogeneous decision-making units (DMUs) with multiple inputs and outputs [12].…”

“…As mentioned earlier, the impacts of green transport policy [2] and low-carbon innovation [3] were analyzed by using the conventional regression of the log linearization of the model. Meanwhile, in order to examine whether China's gasoline and diesel prices adjust asymmetrically to international crude oil price changes, a linear regression was used to analyze its long-run relationship and an error-correction methodology was introduced to examine the short-run dynamics of gasoline or diesel price changes in response to changes in international oil prices [10].…”

“…Therefore, one study proposes a new concept of "pollution rebound effect" (PRE) to estimate the effectiveness of green traffic policies. The empirical results indicate that direct PRE did not exist in the road passenger transport sector for the whole of China during 1986-2014, and implies that improving the fuel efficiency of vehicles is a useful policy option for decreasing transport energy use, resulting in the reduction of harmful gas emissions [2].…”