Impacts of aviation subsidies on regional wellbeing: Systematic review, meta-analysis and future research directions

Abstract

More than 100 publications were systematically reviewed on the contemporary topic of aviation subsidies and their impacts on regional wellbeing. Our results show that the US and European countries have received significant attention in prior research. Moreover, the majority of publications were concerned with air transport activity, whereas economic, social and environmental wellbeing were less researched. It was noted that a full picture of aviation subsidies' impacts on regional wellbeing remains uncertain, as the majority of prior studies have mostly examined indicators associated with air services. Our meta-regression results further suggest that subsidy types, subsidy beneficiaries, study characteristics, geographic areas and research methods are important likely sources of variation in the likelihood of investigating various wellbeing categories. It seems that a prior publication studies aviation subsidies’ impacts on environmental wellbeing over other wellbeing categories (i.e. air transport activity, economic wellbeing, and social wellbeing) is less likely to report the positive effects of aviation subsidies. Our systematic review helps identifying several directions for future studies.