Impacts of Liberalisation and Regionalisation on the Development of Belgian Airports: Analysing the Walloon Success Story

This article analyses the development of Belgian airports in the last twenty years with a specific focus on the Walloon airports of Charleroi and Liege. The authors demonstrate that the rapid development of these airports can be explained by a combination of the two political events of the liberalisation of air traffic in Europe and the regionalisation of the public mandate for airports. Using public policy analysis, the authors produce a portrait of the two airports while comparing their trajectories to that of Brussels, the main airport in Belgium.