Airports, access and local economic performance: evidence from China

Stephen Gibbons and Wenjie Wu
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: 武文杰

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: In 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.

Keywords: airports; public infrastructure; local developments; China; UKRI fund; OUP prepayment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H54 O21 P25 R41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2019-06-24
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in Journal of Economic Geography, 24, June, 2019. ISSN: 1468-2702

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http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/101227/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Airports, access and local economic performance: evidence from China (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:101227

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