Economic modelling can do a lot of things. It can even be used to forecast and explain the specific number of medals won by a county at the Olympics.
Putting the population, the average level of income, the political history and the country's results in the past into an equation, the analysts at advisory firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) tried to guess how the countries participating to the 2004 Olympics in Athens would perform.
Romania is expected to win 23 medals, compared with 26 in 2000, therefore it is supposed to go down one place in the country ranking compared with 2000, coming out 12th.
"It is obvious that the number of Olympic medals does not depend on political and economical factors alone, and our analysis is a rather more light-hearted exercise. It is, however, interesting to see how far statistical models can help explain the number of medals won by each country," says John Hawksworth, head of the Macroeconomics Unit of PricewaterhouseCoopers UK.
As expected, the bigger and richer countries get better results, though effects do no always seem to be directly proportional with these factors, as many of the smaller countries obtain much better results than expected for their size.
"We still find that many of the former Soviet bloc countries get much better results than would be expected based on the size of their economies, as the strong sports traditions in these countries have generally survived the change of political regime," Hawksworth says.
The survey finds that in explaining the number of medals won by each country out of the total number of medals on offer, the following factors are statistically significant: population, average income levels (measured by GDP per capita), whether the country was previously part of the former Soviet bloc (including Cuba in this case), whether the country is the host nation and medal shares in the previous Olympic Games.
PwC's economic analysts show that despite the fact that fifteen years have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, many of the ex-Soviet bloc countries kept winning more Olympic medals than forecast based on the size of their economies.
The PwC model generally explains about 90% of the fluctuation in the number of medals won by various countries in the Olympic Games in recent years. The big exception to this regards "whether a country was formerly in the Soviet bloc", which breaks the connection between economic performance and athletic performance. This is, without a doubt, due to the high political importance given to sport in many of these countries.
Evidence from the Sydney Olympics (2000) suggests that these effects were still significant, although they might be expected to decrease gradually over time in the future. The PwC survey also found that it was worth distinguishing between the group of ex-Soviet countries who gave particular importance to sport (e.g. Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania and Cuba) and other ex-Soviet or planned economies where this was less of a priority.
razvan.voican@zf.ro
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