ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the impacts of airports in geographical peripheries. It focuses on geographical peripheries, which helps to narrow the definition. As a result of the accessibility that they provide, airports in geographical peripheries have important wider impacts; for instance, on regional economic and social development. An important issue when dealing with mobility is evaluating how people and firms are served by air transport in different regions – e.g. core, intermediate, and remote regions. Pure centrality measures are used generally to describe the prominence of a specific node within a network according to different definitions of relevance. The regional connectivity level is estimated as the average number of paths to reach all other regions in a given year – i.e. an accessibility measure that takes into account the entire regional European network. As a consequence, in many countries there are policies aimed at improving remote region connectivity through a public service obligation.
