Determining Spatial Relationships between Airports and Local Economy from Competitiveness Perspective: A Case Study of Airports in China

The intent of this research is to present an investigation into whether spatial relationships in China’s airports are primarily characterised by competition or complementarity; accordingly, this is approached from the perspectives of passenger and cargo traffic. This research also focused on two issues: The first is the spatial Durbin model (SDM), which is used to judge the competition or complementarity among airports with spatial dependence as an indicator. Second, considering that airport activities may be affected by neighbouring cities due to the externality of economic development, the spillover effects of different geo-economic factors at the city level are calculated. Through the utilisation of a spatial Durbin model and yearly airport traffic data for 34 Chinese airports between 2007 and 2019, it was found that the nature of spatial relationships tends to differ regarding passengers and cargo traffic. Concerning passenger traffic, airports in China are mainly characterised by complementarity and are competitive regarding cargo traffic. This study also indicates that the geo-economic factors of central cities (Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou) can affect the spatial relationship between China’s airports. China’s airports are more dependent on the economic development of central cities, and therefore more dependent on the traffic replenishment at China’s hub airports. In addition, the validity of the asymmetrical economic weight matrix illustrates that after controlling the exogenous interaction effects between the independent variables and dependent variables, the difference of regional economic development and airport traffic does lead to endogenous interaction effects among China’s airports.