مشخصه توزیع فضایی فرودگاه های چینی: یک روش تابع هزینه فضایی  Spatial distribution characteristic of Chinese airports: A spatial cost function approach

1. Introduction Airports located in specific locations serve China’s transportation network as feeders of a hub-and-spoke system and as origins or destinations of point-to-point services (Button, 2002). The airport network service contributes to China’s economic growth and regional development (Wells and Young, 2004). Research conducted on China’s airports has generally focused on efficiency and productivity, while neglecting the role of space in the study of airport activity (Fung, 2008; Fung et al., 2008a, 2008b; Fan et al., 2014). Therefore, the locations of airports and its spatial effects are needed to be included into consideration to study airport benchmarking and policy review (Lian and Rønnevik, 2010; Frohlich and Niemeier, 2011; Fan et al., 2014; Pavlyuk, 2016 € ). The present research aims at filling this gap and analyze Chinese airports using spatial models; a cost function is estimated for the period from 2002 to 2012 that takes into account the spatial effects measured by latitude and longitude of the airports analyzed. The motivations behind the present research are the following. First, China is an extensive country, and airports are a core asset for connecting the country and regions; therefore, an understanding ofthe spatial distribution of airports around the country is important. As the connectivity of China’s airports is complementary rather than competitive in nature, establishing a balance of competition and cooperation (Derudder et al., 2010), it is important to understand the spatial correlations that may exist on airports (Miller, 1999). Second, China’s airports have recently undergone several reforms since Deng Xiaoping’s policy changes. In this context, an analysis of the cost of China’s airports, as well as of their observed spatial characteristics, is justified, as it may help clarify the role that transportation networks play in cost, and thus allow for analysis that proposes optimal cost controls. Third, built on the deregulation of China’s air transportation, the hub airports also faced increasing competition for hub passengers because of the adoption of huband-spoke models for organizing route structures (Button, 2002). This factor justifies the focus on cost efficiency and the adoption of spatial analysis to identify spatial correlations. Finally, while research has noted the significant effects of location on an airport’s performance or productivity, no study has used spatial models in its methodology. Rather, the existing literature mainly focuses on the technical efficiency or productivity of Chinese civil airports with traditional SFA (Stochastic Frontier Analysis), which ignore independence between observations. This paper is innovative and make use of the spatial models found in the SFA to examine the cost ef- * Corresponding author. ficiency of Chinese airports. The present research analyzes the cost functions of Chinese airports during the period from 2002 to 2012 using five alternative spatial models, which (to reiterate) no study on Chinese airports had done before. It also provides certain policy implications for improving cost efficiency that should be considered before a new round of construction of civil airports begins (Hyard, 2013). This research is of particular interest at this time (Chang et al., 2013; Fan et al., 2014; Jiang and Zhang, 2014; Wang et al., 2015).