  China's rapid economic growth resulted in serious air pollution, which caused
substantial losses to economic development and residents' health. In
particular, the road transport sector has been blamed to be one of the major
emitters. During the past decades, fluctuation in the international oil prices
has imposed significant impacts on the China's road transport sector.
Therefore, we propose an assumption that China's provincial economies are
independent "economic entities". Based on this assumption, we investigate the
China's road transport fuel (i.e., gasoline and diesel) demand system by using
the panel data of all 31 Chinese provinces except Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan.
To connect the fuel demand system and the air pollution emissions, we propose
the concept of pollution emissions elasticities to estimate the air pollution
emissions from the road transport sector, and residents' health losses by a
simplified approach consisting of air pollution concentrations and health loss
assessment models under different scenarios based on real-world oil price
fluctuations. Our framework, to the best of our knowledge, is the first attempt
to address the transmission mechanism between the fuel demand system in road
transport sector and residents' health losses in the transitional China.
