Causality Relationship Between Airports And Economic Growth In Türkiye: Panel Data Analysis Approach For 12 Airport Provinces

The question of whether airports promote economic growth at the regional and city levels has long been debated by researchers. There is more than 40 years of debate in the literature on the question of how airports affect economies and what variables can be used to measure the relationship between the two systems. The problem is the direction of the causal relationship between airports and economic growth, who affects whom, the size and importance of the effect, and how to measure it. In the light of these debates, this paper aims to investigate the impact of 12 provincial airports in Turkey on the economy of their provinces. The article focuses on the effect of air transportation in 12 large provinces on the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, which is one of the economic indicators of that province, between 2007 and 2023 with panel data obtained at the provincial level, and the cause-effect relationship, and in this sense, it has a different perspective from the studies in the literature in our country since it tries to establish a direct relationship at the provincial level and with GDP percapita. As a result of the article, it is concluded that there is a significant relationship between airports and GDP percapita and that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between airports and economic growth.