Measuring Beijing's international air connectivity and suggestions for improvement post COVID-19

Linfeng Zhang, Meng Hou, Yichen Liu, Kun Wang and Hangjun Yang

Transport Policy, 2022, vol. 116, issue C, 132-143

Abstract: This study empirically measures Beijing's international air connectivity through descriptive statistics and various connectivity indexes. In particular, we comprehensively benchmark Beijing's international air connectivity with other major international exchange centers and gateway airports around the world. It is found that, although Beijing has direct flights to a comparable number of foreign destinations, the city still significantly lags behind other major counterparts in international air connectivity. This is due to Beijing's inferior connection quality in terms of flight frequency, number of seats, flying distance, and its poor international transfer capability. Moreover, a gravity-type model is applied to investigate the determinants of Beijing's route-level direct flight traffic. An index of potential market size is calculated for a sample including candidate overseas airports without direct flights with Beijing. It is found that Beijing has already opened direct flights to most of the candidate airports that have high market potentials. The air transport market potentials to major B&R (Belt-and-Road) cities are very low. However, given China's growing trade and economic ties with the B&R countries, Beijing could consider more favorable policies in support of direct flight operations to B&R countries. It is more important for Beijing to upgrade air connectivity quality by liberalizing restrictions on flight frequency and airfare. The newly opened Beijing Daxing Airport adds valuable capacity for Beijing to better explore international connectivity. Although COVID-19 pandemic forces Beijing to shut down international flight operations until now, the city needs to formulate clearer long-term strategies to improve international its air connectivity.

Keywords: International air connectivity; Beijing; Gravity model; Direct flight traffic; COVID-19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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/S0967070X2100336X
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:trapol:v:116:y:2022:i:c:p:132-143

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
https://shop.elsevie ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

DOI: 10.1016/j.tranpol.2021.11.015

Access Statistics for this article

Transport Policy is currently edited by Y. Hayashi

More articles in Transport Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().