COVID-19 and the aviation industry: The interrelationship between the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and the frequency of flights on the EU market

Anyu Liu, Yoo Ri Kim and John Frankie O'Connell

Annals of Tourism Research, 2021, vol. 91, issue C

Abstract: This study aims to investigate the contribution of aviation related travel restrictions to control the spread of COVID-19 in Europe by using quasi-experiment approaches including the regression discontinuity design and a two-stage spatial Durbin model with an instrumental variable. The study provides concrete evidence that the severe curtailing of flights had a spontaneous impact in controlling the spread of COVID-19. The counterfactual analysis encapsulated the spillover effects deduced that a 1% decrease in flight frequency can decrease the number of confirmed cases by 0.908%. The study also reveals that during the lockdown, the aviation industry cancelled over 795,000 flights, which resulted in averting an additional six million people being from being infected and saving 101,309 lives.

Keywords: COVID-19; Travel restrictions; Airline; Flight frequency; Regression discontinuity design; Two-stage spatial Durbin model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160738321001766
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:anture:v:91:y:2021:i:c:s0160738321001766

DOI: 10.1016/j.annals.2021.103298

Access Statistics for this article

Annals of Tourism Research is currently edited by John Tribe

More articles in Annals of Tourism Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().