The Relationship between the Airport Economy and Regional Development in China

ABSTRACT

It is of great significance to enhance the coupling relationship between the airport economy and regional development in order to promote regional coordinated growth. Based on data of 35 major airport cities in China from 2004 to 2018, this research empirically analyzes the coupling relationship between the airport economy and regional development and puts forward the concept of the leap path. The results show that the degree of coupling between the airport economy and regional development presents a fluctuating upward trend, but on the whole it is still at a low level of maladjustment decline. It decreases from east to west by region, and the eastern region has entered a form of coordinated development. According to the coupling state of regional development and airport economy, each city needs to explore its own suitable leap path. Governments at all levels should invest more public resources into airport economic zones and promote the integrated development of “port-industry-city-region.” At the same time, governments can more actively explore the construction of an Air Silk Road and an airport-type-free trade port.

KEYWORDS:

• Airport economy
• regional development
• coupling relationship

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• O18
• R11

Acknowledgement

We are grateful to Chun-Ping Chang for his guidance on an earlier version of this article. We are also grateful to the anonymous referees for helpful suggestions. Kai Tang is grateful to Youth fund for humanities and social sciences research of the Ministry of Education (20YJC790124), Henan Philosophy and Social Science Planning Project (2019CJJ088), Construction Project of Excellent Young Scientific Research Team in Humanities and Social Sciences of Zhengzhou University (2020-QNTD-10) , Incubation Research Base Project of New Disciplines of Economics Management of Zhengzhou University (101/32610168), and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation funded project (2020M672240).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

1. We also calculate the indices of the airport economy and regional development of the sample cities according to Equations (1)(1) $q(x)=\sum _j^{\hspace{0.17em}}{b}_j{x}_j$(1) and (2(2) $s(y)=\sum _j^{\hspace{0.17em}}{a}_j{y}_j$(2) ) in the development measurement model and conduct an analysis of system development based on this. The results and analysis are in Appendix C.