It takes gold to compete for gold : economy and Olympic Games

Abstract

During the Olympic Games in Rio, it costs Great Britain 4.1 million pounds to win a single Olympic gold medal. The idea of the current research was generated while thinking about the benefits country gets in case of earning medals during the Olympic Games. The possible benefit that was hypothesized is the physical activity of the citizens. In order to fully understand the connection the current study analyzes the relationship between economic development, the number of weighted medals gained during the Olympic Games and the insufficient physical activity of the citizens. The research is comprised of two separate models that use two different methodologies (panel data analysis and cross-sectional analysis). The first model determines the connection between economic development of a country in the form of part of GDP dedicated to sports (limited to the European country’s data). The second model tries to determine the connection between the number of medals the country gain during the 2014 Olympic Games and the physical activity of citizens in 2016. The key finding is that there is a positive connection between economic development of a country and weighted medals per capita of European countries and that there is a positive relationship between insufficient physical activity and economic development of a country as well as the number of medals the country gained.