Quantifying the impacts of air transportation on economic productivity: a quasi-experimental causal analysis

Jose M. Carbo and Daniel J. Graham

Economics of Transportation, 2020, vol. 24, issue C

Abstract: Air transport capacity expansions are often justified on the grounds that they will improve economic performance and induce growth. Such causal impacts are hard to identify empirically due to the fundamentally endogenous nature of the relationship between air transport and the economy. This paper contributes to the empirical literature on aviation-economy effects by conducting a case study of the impacts of air transportation activity on productivity in Chinese provinces. For exogenous variation we exploit a policy scenario created by the 2003 deregulation of the Chinese aviation sector, which was applied in all provinces of China except Beijing and Tibet. We find that this policy intervention resulted in substantial growth in air transport passengers and cargo. We estimate the causal effect of air transport on productivity by comparing GDP per employee in Tibet relative to a synthetic control region affected by the deregulation policy. We find a significant positive productivity effect from aviation expansion following the 2003 deregulation. Use of a differences-in-differences specification confirms this result.

Keywords: Air transport; Aviation; Causal inference; Productivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L93 R1 R4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212012220301313
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:ecotra:v:24:y:2020:i:c:s2212012220301313

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecotra.2020.100195

Access Statistics for this article

Economics of Transportation is currently edited by Mogens Fosgerau and Erik Verhoef

More articles in Economics of Transportation from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().