Abstract
AbstractIn this article, we study the effect of airports on local economic performance that arises from better access to domestic markets in the context of China’s recent airport network expansion. We measure access through the changes in network closeness centrality implied by the contraction in potential journey times between counties within China. Our key finding is that better access—primarily due to landside distance reductions to airports—increased manufacturing productivity. The analysis is carried out on a panel of counties built from micro data on industrial firms, administrative records and census data. To mitigate endogeneity issues, we focus on a subsample of ‘incidentally’ affected counties, whose location midway between existing and new airports implies that they were neither explicitly targeted for development nor directly affected by airport operations.
Highlights
Air transport is, self-an important facilitator of the movement of goods and people in and between countries across the globe
New airports built in later periods were widely scattered and their locations appear to be driven by a process of filling in gaps in the network rather than targeting towards specific regions
We provide new evidence that the rapid expansion of air transport infrastructure in China over the 2000s led to substantial growth in industrial output, productivity and Gross Domestic Product (GDP), using firm-level and county-level datasets
Summary
Self-an important facilitator of the movement of goods and people in and between countries across the globe. By 2013, China was the world’s second largest air transportation market, carrying 353 million passengers and moving 16 billion tonne kilometres of freight (compared with 743 million passengers and 37 billion tonne kilometres in the USA).3 This rapid expansion means that there are many new airports and large changes in the geographical patterns of accessibility on which we can base our estimation. Gibbons and Wu for intermediate goods and services from the local economy (so called ‘indirect’ and ‘induced impacts’) and the impact of other transport infrastructure or other local policies that were put in place to support the airport development All this analysis is conducted on a unique bespoke panel dataset of counties— covering mainland counties and urban districts in China, constructed from micro data from the Annual Survey of Industrial Firms, statistical yearbooks, the population census and various other web and geographical sources.
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