DISENTANGLING CAUSE AND EFFECT IN THE CO-EVOLUTION OF AIR PASSENGER TRAFFIC AND TRADE: THE CASE OF ASIAPACIFIC;;1980-2010

摘要

During the last few decades;;rising intra-regional volumes of trade as well as air passenger traffic have been key characteristics of Asia-Pacific’s economic development. In our research;; we seek to uncover the causality in these processes. Although parallel developments in volumes of air passenger traffic and trade seem commonsensical;;relatively little is known about how these similarities are empirically constituted. In principle;;there are four possible scenarios: (1) in spite of the common sense;;there is no co-evolution so that both patterns develop independently;;(2) there is ‘real’ co-evolution in that both patterns influence each other through feedback loops;;(3) international air passenger traffic is facilitated by international trade;;or (4) international trade is facilitated by air passenger traffic. We scrutinize the alleged co-evolution of trade and air passenger traffic for Asia-Pacific and country-pairs within this region (e.g. the link between Japan and Malaysia) by performing Granger causality tests on time series cross-section datasets running from 1980 to 2010. Based on these results;;we discuss some general trends;;which can be tied to Asia-Pacific’s ongoing air traffic deregulation and its overall economic integration.