Airports, access and local economic performance: evidence from China

Are Chinese cities too small?

Stephen Gibbons and Wenjie Wu

Journal of Economic Geography, 2020, vol. 20, issue 4, 903-937

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 development; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H54 O21 P25 R41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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Journal of Economic Geography is currently edited by Jorge De la Roca, Stephen Gibbons, Simona Iammarino, Amanda Ross and James Faulconbridge

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