Reconsidering Performance at the Summer Olympics and Revealed Comparative Advantage

Abstract

This article examines the performance of the participating countries at the Summer Olympic Games. It investigates each country's performance and attempts to identify the determinants of this performance in each sport, and also examines other issues related to specialization at these games, using the concept of revealed comparative advantage (RCA) developed in the field of international economics. Each country's RCA is explained by geographical, biological, and economic variables of the participating countries. Most previous studies investigated the correlation between total/per capita performance and a wide range of variables using a range of methods the authors' consider inappropriate. A few studies employed more appropriate censoring methods; however, they did not consider heteroscedasticity or nonnormality in their regressions that could make the estimates inconsistent. In addition, RCA and specialization in the Olympics has never been analyzed. The analyses present the determinants of each country's specialization in sports and the patterns of RCA, which are substantially different from those obtained when analyzing total and per capita performance. The authors found that high-income countries specialize less; in other words, they win medals in a more diversified range of sports, which is analogous to a country's patterns of specialization in production, a topic frequently explored in international economics.

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