Changing Governance and Regulation of Airports: A Comparison of Austria, Denmark, Italy, Hungary, Portugal, and Spain

Abstract

All airports serve a region and some also serve a nation. This chapter considers regional aspects of the evolution of airport governance and regulation over recent decades. This chapter both widens the scope of academic scrutiny to many countries previously neglected in the academic literature, but also considers how these changes may have been applied and had different impacts at the regional rather than at the national level. In changing the focus in these ways, we retain the economist’s concern for the impact of the changes on the incentives for cost and allocative efficiency. The chapter focuses on the major airports in core regions as most of these airports still have persistent market power and are regulated. Small airports in peripheral regions face different problems such as covering fixed costs. Regulation is here less of a problem. The paper shows that privatization has set out mixed incentives for efficiency. Even though competition has increased for some airports, the major regional airports retain substantial market power, in part because market structure has rarely changed with privatization. This puts a heavy importance on regulatory incentives.