Next stop? The world!
"Intangible Benefits" via www.news.ualberta.ca:
At the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games, when Canadians roared with delight at a medal haul that placed the country at an “all-time, all-nation Winter Olympics record of 14 gold medals,” athletes did more than win gold–they fired up exuberant displays of national pride and unity across the country.
And new research involving the University of Alberta suggests Canadians are willing to pay to get them.
In fact, the research pegs the intangible benefits generated by the Canadian government’s Own the Podium program at between three and five times its cost: between $215 million and $3.4 billion.
U of A economist Brad Humphreys and sport management professor Dan Mason worked with economists Bruce Johnson of Centre College, Kentucky, and John Whitehead of Appalachian State University, North Carolina, to determine Canadians’ willingness to pay for Team Canada’s success at the 2010 Winter Olympics. Using nationally representative surveys of Canadians, they sought to understand how people saw and valued the Own the Podium program, which supported elite athletes to the tune of $110 million in hopes of putting more Canadian athletes on the podium at the 2010 Winter Olympics than ever before.
The researchers used the contingent valuation method (CVM), commonly used by economists to measure the value of public goods, in a unique way. About 2,000 Canadians were surveyed before and after the Games about their willingness to pay extra taxes to support elite athletes and enhance medal success. No previous study has analyzed outcomes of sports mega-events using the CVM method, according to the authors. ...
The rest is just a bunch of quotes from Dan and Brad. Blah, blah, blah.
Here is the link to the working paper at RePEc: http://ideas.repec.org/p/ris/albaec/2011_020.html.
