In a recent article, Shao et al. (2014) formulate economy-wide energy rebound effect based on the IPAT equation and employ latent variable approach for estimation. We argue that their formulation should be revised, and advocate the distinguishment between energy efficiency improvement and technological progress for estimating energy rebound effect. An application to estimate China's energy rebound effect over 1981-2011 is also provided. (c) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.