Aeropolitics in East Asia : a comparative case study

Abstract

Air transport is a key instrument of the increasingly global flows of goods, services, and people. Despite the fact that commercial aviation can be seen as a vanguard of globalisation, it remains one of the most tightly regulated and nationally controlled industries in the world. While progressive deregulation has taken place in certain regions, most importantly in North America and Europe, much of the world continues to be dominated by restrictive, state-centric bilateral air service agreements. Since the particular institutional and geographical settings of East Asia impede making direct inferences from air transport deregulation in the West, there is a need to develop a better understanding of the air transport environment in the region.

his study aims at analysing the endogenous factors that influence the development of aeropolitics on the global scale, in general, and in East Asia, in specific. A mixed methods approach, combining both qualitative and quantitative tools, is used to uncover the relationships between factors related to institutional organisation and polity size, on the one hand, and aeropolitics, on the other. The first part of the study consists of a predominantly quantitative analysis of the relationships on the global scale. Since the quantitative section can at most point to potential causal linkages, it is followed by an in-depth qualitative case study section, focusing on aeropolitical development in three East Asian polities of China, Hong Kong, and South Korea.

This study argues that aeropolitics cannot be analysed without due attention to the context in which aeropolitical development takes place. While the direct effects of geographical, demographic, and economic factors remain limited, the importance of the polity-level institutional framework to aeropolitics cannot be overstated. More precisely, economic institutions have a direct impact on the development of aeropolitics, while political institutions set the boundaries within which economic institutions operate.