Effects of Air Transport Market Liberalisation in the East African Community (EAC)

摘要

The aviation sector in Africa is one of the least studied in the world. Using a unique data set collected for the EAC, this paper investigates how liberalisation has affected fares and service quality, and how further liberalisation may affect the aviation sectorand benefit regional economies. The main results provide robust evidence that liberalisation leads to lower fares and higher frequencies, which in turn stimulate passenger demand. Fully liberalising restricted routes reduces average fares by 9 per cent and increases frequencies by 41 per cent.Furthermore, the results show that partial liberalisation is not effective in achieving equivalent impacts.