New evidence suggests that air services do boost regionaleconomic growth

Airports have become a familiar presence both in and near many U.S. cities in recent decades, but are they actually beneficial to a region’s economic growth? In new research which takes advantage of 1978’s Aviation Deregulation Act to study air services’ effects, Bruce Blonigen and Anca Cristea find that a 50 percent increase in air traffic leads to a 7.5 percent rise in a region’s real GDP over 20 years. They also find that this growth occurs almost exclusively in the service and retail sectors.