Research On The Civil Airport Operating-subsidy Policy

The airport operating-subsidy guarantees the supplement of the universal services of airports, and can fully mobilize the enthusiasm of all parties. It is important to subsidize the airports properly to achieve rapid, healthy and sustainable development of our civil airports.This paper analyzes the reasons why airports lose by using the economic theories. It points out that in order to supply sufficient universal services, airports will lose inevitably because they are public goods and they have external effects. So the governments must consider their external effects and give them the necessary subsidies. This paper also analyzes the'principal-agent problem'that may appear in the course of subsidizing, and gives two solutions: first, to consider the operating efficiency of the airports and second, to establish the credit rating mechanisms.This paper describes the foreign countries'airport operating-subsidy policies, such as US, Canada, Japan and EU, and also introduces the subsidy policies of other industries, just as railway, port, post and telecom.After analyzing the current airport operating-subsidy policy of our country and its deficiencies, this paper gives five different programs of subsidizing the airports. ProgramⅠis to calculate the subsidy amounts according to the level of universal service which the airports supply. ProgramⅡis to ensure that the marginal cost is equal to the marginal revenue. ProgramⅢis to set a reasonable airport scale and to ensure that the cost is equal to the revenue. ProgramⅣis to set a reasonable operating efficiency and to subsidize the cost that was not caused by the efficiency. ProgramⅤis an integrated program. It considers the characteristics of different airports and it needs to classify the airports. After calculating the subsidy amounts of different airports by using different methods, it needs to adjust the amount according to their operating efficiencies.Finally, in order to illustrate the programⅤ, the author calculates the subsidy amounts of 2005 of the 64 airports by using the statistic methods and econometrics methods. First, the author divides the 92 airports into two categories-the profit airports and the nonprofit airports, then divides the profit airports into 3 categories and divides the nonprofit airports into 5 categories according to their conditions and their development. Second, the author calculates their subsidy amounts by using different methods. Last, the author calculates their DEA efficiencies of 2005 to adjust their subsidy amounts.