Economic Impact Analysis on Olympic Host-Cities

When a city decides to undertake an Olympic Games, they do so with the notion that hosting the Olympics will provide many direct financial benefits to the city in addition to countless other indirect benefits. Like many activities, the Summer-Olympic Games tend to be more popular when it is warm, and this paper will focus on only the previous five Summer Olympic Games. As host cities look to cash in on the Olympic Games popularity, the number of Olympic infrastructure projects has skyrocketed, leaving many cities with facilities that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build and nothing to use them for post-Olympics. However, every few years' cities continue to compete vehemently to the win the bid for the host city of the next Olympic Games. This paper seeks to examine whether the benefits of hosting the Summer Olympics are valid and if they are substantially inflated, or non-existent. In part, it will focus on the broad economic benefits, the costs associated with it, ‘legacy benefits,' other intangible benefits, and the overall net effect of these benefits and costs. This general purpose of this paper will be to analyze the previous five Summer Olympic Games and discern whether hosting the Summer Olympic Games is a profitable endeavor.