Evaluating the economic impacts of hosting the Olympic Games: Why are more cities in emerging markets increasingly bidding and winning the right to host?

Abstract

This paper will evaluate the economic impacts of hosting an Olympics. City and State officials claim

that hosting the Olympics can deliver both short and long-term economic impacts for the city and

country at large, but economist remain skeptical of the event's large upfront costs and an

overestimation of the projected economic impacts. Most of the empirical studies used for this paper

state that the Olympics tends to lose money for the host city, and when gains are made, they are

negligible at best. This matched by the fact that cities in emerging markets are increasingly bidding

and winning the rights to host the Olympics, is what this research has been based on. We argue that

emerging markets are overleveraging themselves by hosting the Olympics in order to boost global

cities competiveness, expand current infrastructure stock, and improve their brand value through soft

power.