Socioeconomic impact of Malpensa airport
Malpensa airport acts as a capital attractor, job generator, and activator or catalyst of investment initiatives for the whole Lombardy region (and you could say the whole north-west area of Italy).
It also acts as an extraordinary driver in some specific economic sectors such as tourism, logistics, transport and trade.
Therefore, we have built a data platform to periodically measure the socioeconomic impact locally generated by Malpensa airport.
In line with the most common approaches in the literature on infrastructure and transport networks, direct, indirect, induced and catalytic impact analyses have been combined and integrated. The aim is to understand what are the socioeconomic impacts where airport is direct protagonist as well as originator, rather than just an activator or even a central though not exclusive player.
Types of impacts analysed
- Direct impact
Generated by the whole range of economic activities that provide services to passengers and goods by operating in airport grounds (e.g. carriers, shops, cafés and restaurants, car rentals, banks, freight forwarders, cargo, handlers, catering companies etc.).
- Indirect impact
Induced economic activity generated by businesses providing passenger and cargo services while operating outside airport grounds and the supply chains, activated by the direct activity operators, which do not provide direct services.
- Induced impact
Increase in demand caused by spending by income earners involved in various capacities in activities triggered by the presence of airport.
- Tourism catalytic impact
Impact generated through spending in local businesses (hotels and restaurants located outside the airport, car hire, etc.) by tourists and all those who reach the area through the airport.
We assessed repercussions of airport activity on business system, on labour market, on specialization model, on the competitiveness and attractiveness of local area, on its tendency to innovation and on tax revenue collected by local Public Administrations.
Based on data updated at 2015, contained in a study commissioned by Mr Massimiliano Serati, Director of the Research Centre for Territorial Development - LIUC Cattaneo University, direct, indirect, induced and tourism catalytic impacts of our airport system generates repercussions on Lombardy region quantifiable at over 13 billion Euro, corresponding to the capacity to create over 80,000 jobs. Such numbers confirm how the airport infrastructure ensamble managed by SEA is one of the most important “production systems” in the entire region.
Airport’s direct impact in terms of employment is quantified in approximately 16,700 created jobs (SEA accounts for 9.5% of the total figure) and a value of production of 3,173 billion Euro. Local distribution of direct employment repercussions generated by Malpensa Airport was analysed by reclassifying the badges issued to employees based on their municipality of residence in 2015. This analysis shows that over 70% of those employed are resident in Lombardy, over 6% in the neighbouring Province of Novara, and about 20% are resident outside the region. Almost half workers are employed in Province of Varese, where Malpensa Airport is based, while CUV municipalities account for 17-18% of the employment generated by airport (37% of the employment directly generated by Malpensa in Province of Varese).
Socioeconomic impact generated by Malpensa airport
The value of production due to on-site economic activities in 2015 is 3 billion and 173 million Euro. Of these, 9.3% is directly due to SEA. The value of production is the sum of the added value and final sector prices. Based on direct effects, we can calculate indirect and induced effects generated by airport using the multipliers (respectively Leontievian and Keynesian) produced by the regionalised input/output table.
The total production value (direct, indirect and induced) generated by activity of Malpensa Airport is approximately 5.6 billion Euro, while the derived employment is close to 24,000 units. Among the catalytic effects, tourism has been particularly assessed. A survey was carried out with a panel of disembarked passengers at Malpensa investigating their local expenses for transport, hotels, restaurants, shopping, leisure and entertainment: 3,000 interviews during 2013-2014 among international passengers departing from T1 or T2 having spent one night in Lombardy at least. For each item of expenditure and each airport Terminal, the declared average daily per capita expenditure was multiplied by the average stay and then by the number of international visitors who passed through Malpensa in 2014. This gave the overall expenditure for each Terminal. These figures were related to the average employee productivity per worker in each sector considered, generating the figures on catalytic occupational impact. The economic scale of incoming tourism is over 4 billion Euro. Taking into account indirect and induced business impacts generated in the local area, this exceeds 7 billion. Employment generated by incoming tourism at Malpensa exceeds 40,000 units. If indirect impacts are also taken into consideration, it exceeds 57,000 jobs.