Regional change in the hierarchy of Brazilian airports 2007–2016

The global network analysis (GNA) is adapted to a domestic air network analysis (DANA), in order to identify structural changes of the air network of Brazil, with a regional perspective of the country. The networkability of airports involves the measurement of traditional indicators of the GNA, such as connectivity and local centrality. Furthermore, this paper proposes a regional analysis of the hierarchy of airports, by identifying economic factors related to the structural changes of the air network. In addition to a descriptive analysis of networkability and Gross Domestic Product (GDP), this study applies Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Malmquist methods in order to evaluate the efficiency change based on Networkability and GDP by municipality and region. The reached results show that, although airports of the Southeast region are evidently more important in terms of air flows and amount of connections, there is a slight decentralization of air flows and connection to the Midwest and Northeast regions of the country, proven by the increasing networkability of airports and regional economic changes, leading to hierarchical position change of airports in these regions and a structural change of the air network.