Air transport and regional economic growth in China

Abstract

Air transport increased exponentially in China over the last 30 years, but studies on this issue are few. This paper aims to fill in this literature gap. It identifies the key determinants of air transport in the Chinese regions for the period 1995-2006. The empirical results based on an augmented production function indicate that air transport is positively related with economic growth, industrial structure, population density, and openness, but negatively related with ground transportation. The development of air transport, however, varies significantly across regions in terms of growth and competition with ground transport. The competition has become particularly intense in recent years, as high-speed railways have become a formidable challenge to air transport between the short-and mid-range transportation routes.

Empirical estimation of price and income elasticities of air cargo demand: The case of Hong Kong

“…The coefficients of Internet traffic are positive, indicating that a 1% increase in Internet usage is associated with a 0.03-0.09% increase in air cargo traffic. Most of our income elasticity estimations are close to Yao and Yang's (2012) results, although we do not estimate the short-run and long-run elasticities separately. In terms of the magnitude of price elasticity, the upper bound of our estimation is close to the lower bound suggested by Wang et al (1981) and Oum et al (1990).…”

Empirical Evidence from EU-28 Countries on Resilient Transport Infrastructure Systems and Sustainable Economic Growth

“…As in previous studies [53,54,65,67], the total number of passengers (Equations (1), (3)), alongside the volume of goods transported in Europe (Equation (4)) positively influenced GDPC. Likewise, investments in airport infrastructure positively influenced economic growth (Equations (4)- (8)).…”

“…Fernandes and Pacheco [52] revealed for Brazil, from 1966 to 2006, a unidirectional Granger causal link from economic growth to domestic air transport demand. Yao and Yang [53] depicted for 31 Chinese provinces and municipalities, over [1995][1996][1997][1998][1999][2000][2001][2002][2003][2004][2005][2006], that a positive association ensued between air transport and economic growth, industrial structure, population density, as well as openness. By means of the European-level annual data from eighty-six regions, Sustainability 2018, 10, 2900 4 of 34 Mukkala and Tervo [42] noticed a causal relationship from air traffic to regional growth in peripheral regions, although this connection was less evident in central areas.…”

“…Depending on availability, the data was gathered from Eurostat, OECD, and the World Bank. Gross domestic product per capita was employed as a proxy for sustainable economic growth [2,34,39,43,44,51,58,68,76,85,89,93,95], whereas several measures towards transport infrastructure [2,8,39,42,50,54,58,61,68,93], investment in transport infrastructure [8,43,73,81,82,97], transport pollution [34,50,58,89,95,106], and country-level controls [2,53,58,61,85,93,95,106] were considered, as exhibited in Table 4. Source: Authors' work.…”

Access to Small Airports and the Impact on Regional Growth in the UK

“…The developed region would then facilitate connections between small communities and the airport if the airport provides services which society required possibly creating new placemaking opportunities. Airports in close proximity have to compete with one another to gain government funding and support, which can cause disruption in regional and economic development, creating uneven economic growth (Yao & Yang, 2012;Kazda et al, 2017;Niewiadomski, 2019). This causes disparities in regions which have an airport compared to those local authorities without an airport.…”