Economic Impacts of the Olympic Games through State Comparison

After the financially profitable 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games, some cities began to compete for and host the Olympics in part to garner economic growth and development. The purpose of this paper is to study current economic cost and benefit analysis, before quantifying if and when benefits exist for the 1992 Barcelona, 1996 Atlanta and 2000 Sydney Games. To assess the economic impact of hosting the Olympics, the host state/region will be compared to a same-country state/region that did not host the Games through the examination of infrastructure, prestige and general financial growth models over a nine-year period. Apart from one section—construction—from the 1992 Barcelona Games, all models appear to show that host states/regions do not have significantly different changes in growth compared to the control states/regions.