A Study Of The Impact Of Air Transport On The Economy Of City Headquarters

The economic form that the city uses its own superior resources to attract corporate headquarters is called the headquarters economy.In recent years,the strong driving and supporting role of the headquarters economy in the development of the regional real economy has attracted great attention from local governments.How we can attract corporate headquarters to settle in our city and improve the city's headquarters economic performance has become a widespread concern for urban managers.Air transport is the primary mode of transportation that is compatible with the productivity in the era of world economic globalization and knowledge economy.It improves the accessibility of the city,meets the needs of headquarter personnel to travel,realizes face-to-face communication and transmits tacit information.Meanwhile,air transport guides the agglomeration of modern high-tech elements such as intellectual capital to aviation hubs and cities by the effect of time value and promotes the development of the city's professional service industry and the agglomeration of senior talents.Thereby it increases the city's attractiveness to corporate headquarters and promotes the development of the city's headquarters economy.This thesis reviews the research results of domestic and foreign scholars on the relationship between air transportation,professional service industry,senior talents and the headquarters economic performance and summaries related economic theories such as the theory of enterprise space expansion,the location decision theory of enterprise headquarters,the theory of global value chains,and the theory of the fifth shock wave.In terms of theoretical research,a mathematical model for headquarters location decision-making is established based on relevant economic theories.Meanwhile,we do research on the direct effects of the development of air transport on the urban headquarters economic performance and the intermediary effect of the air transport on the city's professional service industry as well as the concentration of senior talents.We also study the intermediary effect of the development of the city's professional service industry and the agglomeration of senior talents on the economic performance of urban headquarters.Then we propose the research hypothesis of this thesis and specifically explores the relationship between the economic performance of urban headquarters,air transport,professional service industry and senior talents.In terms of empirical research,based on panel data of 35 cities in China from 2006 to 2019,this thesis adopts methods such as lagging explanatory variables by one period and introducing dummy variables of provinces to deal with endogenous issues and uses the dynamic system generalized moment model to study the direct effects between the development of air transport and the location decision of corporate headquarters.Next,we use the intermediary effect model based on the structural equation to study the intermediary effect of the professional service industry and senior talents on the development of air transport influencing the economic performance of urban headquarters and analyzes the direct effect and intermediary effect of air transport on the location decision of the headquarters of different ownership companies.Finally,the robustness test is carried out by replacing the economic performance of the city headquarters and the agency indicators of air transportation and changing the sample interval to prove the reliability of the empirical results.According to the research of this thesis,the following conclusions are finally obtained.Firstly,the development of air transport is conducive to improving the economic performance of urban headquarters.For every 1% increase in air passenger traffic,the number of urban corporate headquarters will increase by 0.235%,with direct effects accounting for 64.53%,and intermediary effects accounting for 35.47%.Secondly,the professional service industry and the concentration of senior talents play a part of the intermediary role in the impact of air transportation on the economic performance of the city headquarters.Among them,the intermediary effect of the concentration of senior talents accounts for 72.29% and the intermediary effect of the professional service industry accounts for 27.71%.Thirdly,there are differences between the direct and intermediary effects of air transport on the location decision of the headquarters of different ownership enterprises.In terms of direct effects,the decision coefficients for the location of headquarters of foreign-funded enterprises,private enterprises and state-owned enterprises by air transport are 0.169,0.136,and0.154,respectively.From the perspective of intermediary effect,the two intermediary paths of specialized service industry and high-level talent gathering have a greater impact on the headquarters of foreign-owned enterprises and state-owned enterprises,respectively,which are 0.247 and 0.222,and the intermediary path coefficient of private enterprise headquarters is 0.094.Finally,policy recommendations for improving the economic performance of the city's headquarters are put forward:implement a development pattern that combines air transport and headquarters economy,rely on the development of air transport,attach importance to the development and cultivation of related industries and talents,develop business services and other majors around the needs of corporate headquarters.