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The Economic Determinants of the Olympic Performance in Communist and Post-Communist Countries

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Comparative Economic Studies in Europe

Part of the book series: Studies in Economic Transition ((SET))

Abstract

The chapter first reminds the statist model of sport, its overshooting Olympic performance, and reforms before its final collapse. Moving towards a market-compatible sport system during the transformational economic crisis was not without hindrances ending up into a hybrid sports industry. All these changes affected Olympic performance downwards. Econometric modelling explains all nations’ medal totals at Summer Olympic Games by GDP per capita, population, a host country effect, regional sport specialisation, and a political regime variable taking on board communist and post-communist specificity. A similar model is adapted to Winter Games by adding two variables, snow coverage and endowment in winter sports resorts. Both models provide a statistically significant explanation of how medal totals have evolved in post-communist nations. Used for forecasting, the Winter Olympics model enables checking the impact of doping on Olympic performance with a natural experiment at the 2014 Sochi Games.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Upon the International Olympic Committee decision from one Olympics to the next.

  2. 2.

    That ranked communist countries among DCs and now ranks CPCCs with developing and emerging countries.

  3. 3.

    When run for forecasting national medal totals at the next Games, this model detected in advance 88% of overall medal distribution across participating nations at the 2008 Beijing Games (Andreff 2009).

  4. 4.

    The model was conceived before Croatia joined the EU.

  5. 5.

    An extended and improved variant of Andreff et al. (2008) is now implemented and run at the French Ministry for Sports in view to forecasting medal win distribution at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics (Andreff et al. 2019).

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  1. Pantheon-Sorbonne University, Paris, France

    Wladimir Andreff

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    Wladimir Andreff

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Andreff, W. (2021). The Economic Determinants of the Olympic Performance in Communist and Post-Communist Countries. In: Andreff, W. (eds) Comparative Economic Studies in Europe. Studies in Economic Transition. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48295-4_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48295-4_18

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