A competitive index for international sport

Abstract

This article constructs an index of competitiveness for different international sports. This is done by finding the national characteristics that are associated with sporting success and then noting the countries that participate in the different sports. This enables the various sports to be rated in terms of their competitiveness, thereby allowing judgements to be made regarding how difficult it is to be successful in these sports. Although a sports competitive index will no doubt be of interest to many armchair sporting experts, an answer to this question is also of importance when it comes to government policy with regard to funds directed to sport.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank RMIT's School of Economics and Finance for providing financial support and to Michael Gangemi for his research assistance work on this article.

Notes

¹ Field hockey as played at the Summer Olympic Games is not to be confused with ice hockey.

² Australia has won only a handful of track and field medals in the recent Olympic Games and its national soccer team did not qualify for the World Cup finals between 1974 and 2006.

³ Australian dollars.

⁴ There is also the question of why governments funds elite sports programmes. Some have argued that international sporting success is a ‘pure public good’; alternatively the ‘public choice model’ of political decision-making may explain the reasons for this government expenditure. Regardless of the reasons, elite sports programmes all over the world exist because of public funding.

⁵ The information about the ASC largely comes from ASC annual reports as well as from a paper by Hogan and Norton (2000).

⁶ These are the grants paid directly to the sports. The ASC is also responsible for the AIS, as well as all of the state institutes of sport and this is where the balance of its $157 million annual budget is spent.

⁷ Many academic papers have studied the Olympic Games. For example, there have been at least two papers; Berman et al. (2000) and Veraros et al. (2004), that examine how the stock market is affected by the Games. The literature review presented here will concentrate on research into the determinants of Olympic success.

⁸ Communist, or formally communist nations are more successful.

⁹ The medals data was from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) web page.

¹⁰ The a priori expectations of the relationships between each independent variable and medals have been included in parenthesis.

¹¹ Three countries were ambiguous. Germany was classified as noncommunist as the majority of its population and GDP were in the West. Yemen was also classified as noncommunist. Hong Kong was classified as noncommunist as the economy is capitalist, even though it belongs to communist China.

¹² Source: International Amateur Athletics Federation web site.

¹³ Some of the previous studies have given different weights to gold, silver and bronze medals; for example, Condon et al. (1999Condon et al. (and Moosa and Smith (2004), where as Hoffmann et al. (2002) found that weighting medals made little difference to the results.

¹⁴ Correlation coefficients were also calculated for the same independent variables and a dummy variable showing whether a country has won any medals; however, they were lower than those presented in Table 2.