Congestion spillover effects of Chinese hub airports on international connecting traffic

Abstract

This paper evaluates the congestion spillover effects of the ‘big three’ Chinese hub airports – Beijing Capital (PEK), Shanghai Pudong (PVG), and Guangzhou Baiyun (CAN) – on international connecting traffic with 20 worldwide hubs between 2010 and 2017. We find that the spillover effects, or ‘avoidance’ of the major Chinese hubs, have different spatial distributions across the ‘big three’. Specifically, we find that there are effects between PEK and Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, Singapore, and Dubai; between PVG and Seoul; and between CAN and Hong Kong, Seoul, Kuala Lumpur, Helsinki and Istanbul. This modeling technique also contributes to research on hub airport classification.

KEYWORDS:

• Congestion spillovers
• international air markets
• connecting passengers
• hub airports
• China

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the [National Natural Science Foundation of China] under Grant [number 41701120, number 71201081]; and Key scientific research projects of Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics under Grant [number NZ2016109].

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We can only provide the SCI statistics between 2013 and 2016 as the hourly movement to measure the SCI value in 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2017 are currently not available.

2 Authors’ own calculations based on OAG data.

3 All the figures on the average growth rates shown in this section are calculated by the authors from the OAG dataset described in the text. A table showing the annual changes in connecting passengers for the 23 hubs between 2010 and 2017 can be requested from authors.

4 Other hub airports connecting China and North America are YVR, DTW, LAX, and YYZ. However, their market shares in the entire transfer market are below 1% in 2017. We thus do not consider them in the analysis for consistency.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 41701120, 71201081, 61773203]; Key scientific research projects of Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics [grant number NZ2016109].