The role weight of key factors determining the (infrastructure and traffic) intensity of aviation for the countries of the world

Abstract

The interdependence between air transport and the economic sector can be examined from two directions. Several theoretical and regional studies were published on the economic impact of aviation, which is the fastest growing but the most environmentally harmful among all of the transport subsections. However, out of the many factors that influence the development level/performance of aviation, only the thematization and examination of the relationship with the GDP per capita was carried out for a narrower group of countries. Compared to the past, the author methodologically exceeded previous studies in many respects, since the correlation calculations were carried out on168 countries on 8 hypothetical acting factors and other specific indicators instead of one factor. Furthermore (breaking with the earlier practice), the indicator of passenger traffic per inhabitant was produced not from the data of official statistics (such as ICAO and IATA), which is only related to airlines registered in the given country, but from the complete national airport traffic data that was painstakingly generated by the author. In addition to the global scale, the evaluation of correlation coefficients from a geographical point of view was done according to quantitative categories of hypothetical acting factors and at the same time for every country in the dataset. To illustrate the vast differences among the aviation (infrastructure/traffic) specific indicators, linear scale charts and graphs were made, while the correlation of indicators aggregated by continents was visualized with a logarithmic scaling.