Sustainable Governance for Promotional Market Competitiveness in Chinese Airports after COVID-19

Like many countries, China’s airports faced severe operational challenges after the COVID-19 outbreak. However, this predicament has been better mitigated by the Chinese government’s strong support for the aviation industry. However, whether this supportive policy can ensure the sustainable development of the industry needs to be further evaluated. In order to better understand the role of government promotional policies, this paper attempts to explore the driving mechanisms behind the sustainable development performance of Chinese airports. Using the bootstrap Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) methodology, this study evaluates the operational efficiency of 43 major airports over the period from 2015 to 2022. The efficiency scores are compared with the regional distributions of supply and demand factors, as well as the different sizes based on their annual passenger throughput. The overall operational efficiency showed a fluctuating trend of an initial increase followed by a decline due to COVID-19, with significant regional disparities in airport efficiency. Regional differences are evident, with the eastern region having the highest efficiency value of 0.719, while the central region has the lowest efficiency of 0.594. The findings show that airports in the eastern region perform the best due to the proactive market support with rapidly increasing logistics demand, while airports in the west and northeast regions supported by the strong promotional policies follow closely in terms of operational efficiency. In contrast, airports in the central region are much less efficient due to the lack of market or policy support. To analyze more precisely this conflict on the governance, further analyses show that airport size also has a significant impact on the operational efficiency. Larger airports are typically more efficient, while smaller airports are less efficient, implying the market demand is slightly better to promote the airport operational efficiency than the promotional policies. These findings help us to gain a deeper understanding of the mechanism in the sustainable governance behind the operational efficiency of airports and suggest that more market-oriented appropriate policy direction is required to enhance the competitiveness of the aviation industry. These findings offer valuable insights for policymakers and stakeholders of the developing countries as well, underlining the necessity not for supply-driven policies, but for the demand–pull efforts to optimize resource allocation and adapt to evolving market dynamics.