  The air pollution has become a serious challenge in China. Emissions from
motor vehicles have been found as one main source of air pollution. Although
the Chinese government has taken numerous policies to mitigate the harmful
emissions from road transport sector, it is still uncertain for both policy
makers and researchers to know to what extent the policies are effective in the
short and long terms. Inspired by the concept and empirical results from
current literature on energy rebound effect (ERE), we first propose a new
concept of pollution rebound effect (PRE). Then, we estimate direct air PRE as
a measure for the effectiveness of the policies of reducing air pollution from
transport sector based on time-series data from the period 1986-2014. We find
that the short-term direct air PRE is -1.4105, and the corresponding long-run
PRE is -1.246. The negative results indicate that the direct air PRE does not
exist in road passenger transport sector in China, either in the short term or
in the long term during the period 1986-2014. This implies that the Chinese
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 transport policies in the
transitional China.
