The Study On Residents’ Health Effect Of China’s Road Transport Environmental Tax

In recent years, 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, which has become a major obstacle to our country to achieve sustainable development, protect residents’ health benefits and enhance people’s living standards.The currently energy and environment policies about road transport sector mainly set the "carbon reduction" as fundamental policy objective, which often overlook residents’ health damage and economic losses caused by air pollutants (such as PM2.5, CO, NOx). In addition, many studies only consider macro-policy impact assessment, while neglect road transportation energy demand. Most important, the existing studies, which either only focused on road traffic pollution emission estimates, or on the residents’ health damage assessment, did not investigate the road transport heterogeneity and impact mechanism of "road traffic environment taxes--energy demand--pollution emission--residents’ health losses". Therefore, this paper focuses on the road transport pollution emissions heterogeneity, residents’ health caused by vehicles growth, environment tax rate, and heterogeneity of environmental tax policies.Firstly, this paper sets Beijing as the example and studies the heterogeneity of road traffic pollution. Specifically, this paper reveals the relationship between air pollution and the two road transport subsectors. This study finds that there exists the long-term equilibrium relationship between road transport subsectors and air pollution Index; and both the freight and passenger subsector are unidirectional Granger causing Air Pollution Index. Then, this paper finds that the freight subsector has a quick and strong influence on the Air Pollution Index in the short-term, while the passenger subsector has a longer-term impact. This study estimates the contributions of the two subsectors to the air pollution. The result indicates that, in the long term, relative to the freight subsector, the passenger subsector has more primary responsibility for air pollution.Secondly, based on the panel data of 25 provinces and 306 cities of China from 2002 to 2012, this paper investigates the China’s road transport fuel (i.e. gasoline and diesel) demand system by using the Double-log regression, AIDS and QUAIDS models. Then this paper estimates the key parameters price elasticity of demand and expenditure elasticity of ten kinds of motor vehicle. The estimation from the three methods shows that vehicle fuel demand elasticities are negative, while expenditure elasticities are positive. Moreover, all of the estimates are statistically significant. On this basis, this paper estimates the vehicle fuel consumption under five kinds of tax rate scenarios (5%,10%,25%,35%, and 45%).Thirdly, through proposing the road transport emissions elasticities, this paper estimates changes in the estimated emissions caused by energy demand changes. Study results show that pollution emission price elasticities are negative, while pollution emissions expenditure elasticities are positive. On this basis, this paper uses pollution emission elasticities, air quality models, residents’health and economic assessment models to investigate the pollution emission and health damage under different vehicle growth rates and road traffic environment tax rates.Finally, this paper studies a series of environmental tax policies based on the road transport heterogeneity. This paper summarizes the road transport environmental tax reform programs and main significance in China. Then, based on the passenger and freight sector heterogeneity, from the perspective of the health of the residents, this paper finds that environmental tax policy effect of freight sector is more pronounced than that of the passenger sector. For the heterogeneity of public and private transport sectors, this study finds that the effect of environmental tax on urban private sector is significantly greater than that of the public sector. In addition, based on heterogeneity of fuel, this paper finds that the health effects of the diesel tax is much higher than that of the gasoline tax.In summary, due to the rapid development of China’s road transport sector, excessive energy consumption, and air pollution and damage to residents’health are increasingly serious. To the best of our knowledge, and by taking into account the heterogeneity of road transport, this study is the first attempt to investigate the health effects of road transport environmental tax in China.