Evaluating civil aviation airport competitiveness in the Yangtze River Economic Belt of China: A lens of spatial-temporal evolution

Abstract

The civil aviation industry plays an important role in advancing interregional socio-economic development. Investigating the competitiveness of civil aviation airports (CAAs) from the tempo-spatial change perspective aids in the optimization of airport layout towards balanced and coordinated regional development. This research assesses the overall competitiveness of 86 CAAs in 11 provinces or provincial-level municipalities of the Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB) from 2009 to 2019 by the entropy weight approach, then characterizes their spatial-temporal evolution via Moran index of spatial auto-correlation analysis, and finally explores their dynamic changing tendency of the spatial variability based on Theil index measurement and decomposition. The findings are concluded: 1) From 2009 to 2019, the overall competitiveness of civil aviation airports is dramatically improved and an evidently hierarchical system is formed at the provincial level, with the spatial pattern of “strong in the east and west, weak in the middle”. 2) The global Moran indexes of civil aviation airport competitiveness in 2009, 2014, and 2019 are negative, indicating that superior and inferior airports are likely to be spatially clustered. 3) The local Moran Indexes show that the spatial agglomerations of civil aviation airports tend to be more evident in the recent decade. The high-high competitiveness clusters lie in the Yangtze River Delta Economic Zone for the long run, transforming from “Shanghai-Hangzhou” high-competitiveness pole to “Shanghai-Hangzhou-Nanjing” and further extending to central Jiangsu. Civil aviation airports in provincial capitals and secondary cities have formed clusters of high-low competitiveness. Moreover, clusters of low-low competitiveness stretch from the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau to cities in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River. 4) The interprovincial Theil indexes of civil aviation airport competitiveness fluctuate, with the discrepancy increasing and then decreasing.