Determination of the factors affecting airfreight and mapping similar countries via multidimensional scaling

Abstract

As long as people and freights need to move from one place to another, the civil aviation industry will always exist. In this study, a country-based examination has been made on total airfreight transport. Also, gross domestic product (GDP) and total population data were included in this study. 50 countries were selected according to the most recent value that included the years 2018 or 2019 and 26 of these were included in the analysis which was covered in all three rankings. The purpose of the study is to find the similarities between countries based on the total airfreight transportation, total GDP, and total population. The relationship between the three parameters was examined with the correlation analysis. Afterward, the associated parameters were taken as independent variables and the total airfreight transportation variable was modeled by multiple linear regression analysis. In light of these analyses, GDP and total population have a significant impact on total airfreight transportation. To check the assumptions related to outliers, residuals are determined. To show the outliers and the similarities of the countries clearly, the multidimensional scaling method is used. Multidimensional scaling configuration shows that Turkey and the United Kingdom have similarities in terms of total airfreight numbers.