Assessing the impacts of the new Manchester/Beijing direct flight

In Summer 2016, Manchester Airport Group secured a deal with Hainan Airlines to fly four direct flights weekly between Manchester and Beijing. This week, Hainan announced plans to increase its frequency from four to five flights a week starting in June. This added service will potentially, and depending on aircraft availability, see Hainan’s new Boeing Dreamliners operating this route.

Against this background, SDG Economic Development was appointed by the Manchester China Forum in early March to undertake an assessment of the social and economic impacts caused by the new route. The work is characterising three types of economic and social impacts:

• Those directly related immediately to the new flight service, these are associated primarily with Manchester Airport and its supply chain.

• The indirect impacts, which are the consequential ‘ripples’ of impact accruing to the Manchester, North West, and wider Northern economies.

• The induced impacts, essentially in the form of new consumer spending and activities arising from the direct impacts referred to above.

As such, the work is using a well-tried and procedurally-robust direct-indirect-induced method for capturing the different layers of impact occurring systematically, at present or anticipated for the future.

To provide real insight into how and why these impacts are occurring in the economy, the work has defined a framework of five domains which are being characterised and assessed, namely:

1. Manchester Airport and its supply chains. 

2. Manchester’s Knowledge Base, and the uplifts in Higher and Further Education as a result of the direct connectivity with Beijing. 

3. Manchester’s Business Base, and improvements to jobs, aggregate GVA, and productivity that come from working closer with Chinese firms and the Chinese market. 

4. Skills and Culture, and the likely longer-term effects in the ways that Manchester and the wider North West think, and behave, relative to China. 

5. Infrastructure and Assets, and the extent to which direct connectivity with Beijing and its communities are resulting in increased investment in Manchester and the wider North’s infrastructure and asset bases.

The conceptual framework bringing these five domains together was co-developed with the client, has now been finally approved, and is currently being populated with both quantitative and qualitative data. 

The final output of our work will be a formal report on the economic and social impacts that direct connectivity has given to Manchester and the wider North, some nine months in. Using the three type/five domain model above, it will highlight those areas where clear and authoritative evidence is already available and will set out the logic chains by which subsequent impacts are likely to develop in formalised and present in due course.

The Forum is committed to publishing the report on 10 June 2017.