The impact of the current economic crisis on the geography of air traffic volumes: an empirical analysis

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of air services dynamics during the recent economic crisis. Through a regression analysis, we show that at the country scale, the change in the supply of seats is highly dependent on economic growth, confirming the cyclical nature of the air sector. Hence the crisis of air services has much more affected the USA, Europe and Japan than the rest of the world. However, many countries deviate from this general trend. In a second step, using the existing literature, we explain some of these deviating figures. National specificities and airline strategies seem to influence the intensity of the crisis. We argue that the intensity of the crisis in the US is due to the structural oversupply of the air sector. Through other cases, especially the Middle East, we show that hubbing strategies might reduce the impact of the crisis, or at least make it less dependent upon local economic dynamics. In contrast with other authors, we found no positive impact of the share of low-cost carriers on the supply during the crisis, despite their success in some specific contexts like between Europe and Morocco. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.