The Impacts of Regional Economic Development and Investments on the Air Cargo Market in China

초록

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the Granger causal relationship between the increase of air cargo volume and the economic growth in China, particularly focused on the geographical characteristics, income level, and economic size of each sub-region in the country. For this purpose, this paper collected panel data for 20 years from 2000 to 2019 of 31 provinces in China. The methodology used for the analysis is the VECM or VAR method selectively according to the prior process of tests on stationarity and cointegration. During the process of analysis, we chose methodologies that control the cross-section dependence and the slope heterogeneity among sub-groups, which are common in regional data. The conclusion of this paper is as follows. First, China has a bidirectional causal relationship between its economic growth and air cargo increase at the national level. Second, geographically, a bidirectional causal relationship is shown in the Central and Peripheral regions, whereas a Granger-causal relationship is shown in the direction from economic growth to air cargo increase in advanced regions such as Bohai bay and Yangtze river. The Pearl river delta and the Dongbei regions show the causality of the other way or no significant causality, which reflect the different geo-economic characteristics of the regions. Third, the sub-groups of the medium economic size and middle-income regions shows strong bidirectional causality, which is identified as the characteristic of developing countries or regions in existing researches.. Fourth, among the variables of economic size and income level, which have been randomly used as proxies of economic growth without any preliminary review, the economic size is more closely related to the air cargo volume.