An empirical study on air transport promoting the coordinated regional economic development: A perspective of spatial interaction

Coordinated Regional Economic Development (CRED) is a core pillar of China’s new development philosophy, and the role of civil aviation in advancing CRED has garnered increasing policy and academic attention. CRED is a multidimensional construct encompassing static development equilibrium, dynamic growth convergence, and spatial economic linkage. Examining how air transport shapes CRED, including its causal effects and underlying mechanisms, is critical to defining the strategic role of aviation in regional development policy and generating evidence-based policy insights. Guided by a theory-driven analytical framework, we empirically test our research hypotheses using a 2008–2024 panel dataset of region-pairs across China’s seven major civil aviation regions. Our econometric models yield four core findings. First, air transport has a significant positive causal effect on CRED. This result holds after addressing endogeneity via instrumental variable estimation and a battery of rigorous robustness checks. Second, we identify spatial interaction as the core mediating mechanism: descriptive evidence confirms it is the primary pathway linking air transport to CRED. Third, inter-regional factor circulation acts as a significant moderating condition: the positive association between air transport and CRED is stronger when the factor endowment gap between region-pairs is smaller. Fourth, heterogeneity analyses show that air transport’s positive effect on CRED is more pronounced for region-pairs covering Central-South, North China, and East China, and that this effect gradually weakens over the sample period.