Airport productivity and network centrality in the pandemic outbreak: Lessons from the Turkish airports

The adverse effects of the Covid-19 outbreak on airport performance have been noted in many studies, but the determinants of airport productivity in this period still need to be adequately discussed. Identifying performance drivers during the pandemic may offer insights into the efficient management of airports. In this study, the factors affecting airport productivity during the pandemic were revealed, and the performance sources were explained with attention to network centrality (indegree, outdegree, clustering coefficient, betweenness, and eigenvector), both in the domestic and international context. To do that, the Fixed Proportion Ratio was applied to measure the performances of Turkish airports from 2017 to 2020. Next, Malmquist Productivity Index was used to calculate the technical and technological changes in productivity. Finally, Gradient Boosting Modeling was employed to test the impacts of network centrality measures and other contextual variables on total factor productivity. Results revealed that international networks lost their importance, while domestic networks were the major drivers of airport productivity during the pandemic outbreak. Accessible airports with robust domestic connections (represented by high clustering coefficient and indegree centrality) were less vulnerable in this period.