Spatial effects of urban economic activities on airports’ passenger throughputs: A case study of thirteen cities and nine airports in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, China

This paper employs spatial econometrics to empirically analyze the possible spatial effects of the economic activities of thirteen cities in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region in China on passenger throughput (PT) and infrastructures of nine airports from 2005 to 2019. In the first step, the global Moran's I index with airport PT or city GDP is calculated to explore their overall spatial dependence. In the second step, a suitable spatial measurement model was determined using the Lagrange multiplier, likelihood ratio, Hausman, and Wald tests to evaluate direct and spillover effects of infrastructures of airports, economic activities of cities as well as spatial weight matrix between airports and cities on airport PT, providing an unambiguous basis for policy formulation and testing. The main findings prove that the urban economic and demographic growth directly influences PTs of the local airport and those in neighboring cities. While positive economic activities in all cities promote PT growth in airports, they are also influenced by other factors, including infrastructure and network layout. Finally, the same economic activities of the airport city and neighboring cities have different impacts on the PT under various spatial distance weights.