Dynamic Relationship Between Civil Aviation,Tourism And Economic Growth

The development of China’s civil aviation industry is facing a critical period.Coordinating the development of tourism and civil aviation industry will help civil aviation to achieve its development goals at this stage.This paper uses the data of major tourist cities in China from 2003 to 2017 and the Panel VAR method to explore the relationship between tourism,economic growth and civil aviation under three different situations: overall economic growth,urban and rural economic growth.The significant difference in economic and natural condition between urban and rural areas in China has existed for a long time,empirical studies of civil aviation and tourism has indicated that the relationship between tourism,civil aviation and economic growth might be different if we take into account the characteristics of China’s urban and rural areas.The use of data from major tourist cities,rather than provincial panel data,provides a unique perspective for this paper,avoiding the aggregation of airport data from core cities and remote areas with significant differences,and thus the empirical analysis can reach more accurate conclusions.Most previous studies researching on the nexus between tourism and civil aviation have agreed that tourism and civil aviation may have an endogenous problem of mutual causation,so this paper chooses Panel VAR method to treat all variables as endogenous variables.The empirical results of this paper show that at the overall level,there is a unidirectional causality from aviation to tourism,and from tourism to economic growth.But after disaggregated the tourism and economic into four situations,the results has changed.Firstly the development of aviation promoted inbound and domestic tourism;secondly domestic tourism development and rural economic growth accelerate each other,but in urban areas there is only unidirectional causality from urban growth to domestic tourism;thirdly domestic tourism promoted civil aviation in a relatively long-run or indirectly process.By the way,the disaggregated models unmask another important result,that is,economic growth can influence domestic tourism and further promote the development of civil aviation.This result means that it is meaningful to separate inbound and domestic tourism to improve the accuracy of estimation.This paper discussed the reasons why the causality are reasonable in detail after empirical analysis.The conclusion means that if we only analyze the relationship between three variables,we will neglect important characters of urban/rural areas or inbound domestic tourism.Based on the empirical results,this paper further suggested some policy advices for different areas or situations.