Air traffic and economic growth: the case of developing countries

This paper investigates the relationship between air traffic and economic growth in various developing regions and compares it with an “enduring industry fact” of an elasticity around 2 for the developed world. The analysis is conducted from two distinct databases, both with regional aggregates and with country-level ECM estimations. We conclude that there does not seem to be substantial differences in elasticities across the various regions and we show that the introduction of autonomous country-specific time trends leads to a substantial reduction of elasticity estimates