The causal relationship between air transport and economic growth: Evidence from top ten countries with the largest air transport volume

The main objective of this paper is to explore causal relationship between air transport and economic growth for top ten countries with the largest air transport volume worldwide for the sample period 1970–2021 using conventional bootstrap Toda–Yamamoto and bootstrap Fourier Toda–Yamamoto causality tests. For this purpose, a single composite indicator gathered by principal components analysis as a proxy variable of air transport is used to reflect all dimensions of air transport and to better understand potential effects on the relationship between air transport and economic growth. The empirical findings of the present study revealed that there exists an uni-directional causal relationship from air transport to economic growth for all countries except for Russia and Brazil. A bi-directional causal relationship is also found between air freight transport and economic growth for Japan and between air carrier registered departures and economic growth for China. The results indicate that causality tests based on Fourier approach show more consistent results than conventional causality tests. This study also argues that the use of only one dimension of air transport can lead to relatively weak representativeness of air transport.