Santos Luca J, Oliveira Alessandro V M, Aldrighi Dante Mendes
Center for Airline Economics, Aeronautics Institute of Technology, Brazil.
University of São Paulo, Brazil.
J Air Transp Manag. 2021 Jul;94:102082. doi: 10.1016/j.jairtraman.2021.102082. Epub 2021 May 14.
The economic downturn and the air travel crisis triggered by the recent coronavirus pandemic pose a substantial threat to the new consumer class of many emerging economies. In Brazil, considerable improvements in social inclusion have fostered the emergence of hundreds of thousands of first-time fliers over the past decades. We apply a two-step regression methodology in which the first step consists of identifying air transport markets characterized by greater social inclusion, using indicators of the local economies' income distribution, credit availability, and access to the Internet. In the second step, we inspect the drivers of the plunge in air travel demand since the pandemic began, differentiating markets by their predicted social inclusion intensity. After controlling for potential endogeneity stemming from the spread of COVID-19 through air travel, our results suggest that short and low-density routes are among the most impacted airline markets and that business-oriented routes are more impacted than leisure ones. Finally, we estimate that a market with 1% higher social inclusion is associated with a 0.153%-0.166% more pronounced decline in demand during the pandemic. Therefore, markets that have benefited from greater social inclusion in the country may be the most vulnerable to the current crisis.
近期新冠疫情引发的经济衰退和航空旅行危机，对许多新兴经济体的新消费阶层构成了重大威胁。在巴西，过去几十年来社会包容性的显著改善促使数十万首次乘坐飞机的人出现。我们采用两步回归方法，第一步是利用当地经济的收入分配、信贷可得性和互联网接入指标，识别以更高社会包容性为特征的航空运输市场。第二步，我们考察自疫情开始以来航空旅行需求暴跌的驱动因素，根据预测的社会包容性强度对市场进行区分。在控制了因新冠病毒通过航空旅行传播而产生的潜在内生性后，我们的结果表明，短途和低密度航线是受影响最大的航空市场之一，以商务为导向的航线比休闲航线受到的影响更大。最后，我们估计，社会包容性高1%的市场在疫情期间需求下降幅度会更明显0.153%-0.166%。因此，在该国受益于更大社会包容性的市场可能最容易受到当前危机的影响。
