Abstract
The relation between the amount of medals won at the Olympic games and various welfare indicators has been established for the games of Barcelona and Seoul using a Bayesian method of Poisson regression. It was found that medals won correlate strongly with income as well as with more general welfare indicators and that the elasticity with respect to the size of the population is surprisingly smaller than unity.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Butter, F. A. G. den and C. M. van der Tak: 1992, ‘Olympische medailles als welvaarts-indicator’, Economisch Statistische Berichten 77, pp. 841–844.
Hicks, N. and P. Streeten: 1979, ‘Indicators of development: the search for a basic needs yardstick’, World Development 7, pp. 567–580.
Johnston, D. F.: 1988, ‘Towards a comprehensive ‘quality of life’ index’, Social Indicators Research 20, pp. 473–496.
Larson, D. A. and W. T. Wilford: 1979, ‘The physical quality of life index: A useful social indicator?’, World Development 7, pp. 581–584.
Lind, N. C.: 1992, ‘Some thoughts on the human development index’, Social Indicators Research 27, pp. 89–101.
Lind, N. C.: 1993, ‘A compound index of national development’, Social Indicators Research 28, pp. 267–284.
Ram, R.: 1982, ‘Composite indices of physical quality of life, basic needs fulfilment, and income; a ‘principal component’ representation’, Journal of Development Economics 11, pp. 227–247.
Slottje, D. J.: 1991, ‘Measuring the quality of life across countries’, The Review of Economics and Statistics 73, pp. 684–693.
Suen, W.: 1993, Men, money and medals: An econometric analysis of the Olympic Games (University of Hong Kong, mimeo).
Summers, R. and A. Heston: 1991, ‘The PENN world table (mark 5); an expanded set of international comparisons, 1950–1988’, Quarterly Journal of Economics 106, pp. 327–368.
United Nations Development Program, 1990, Human Development Report 1990. (Oxford University Press, New York/Oxford).
Vos, A. F. de: 1993, A Regression Procedure for Modified Multinomial and Poisson models; with Application to Modelling the Distribution of Olympic Medals (Free University, Amsterdam, mimeo).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Den Butter, F.A.G., van der Tak, C.M. Olympic medals as an indicator of social welfare. Soc Indic Res 35, 27–37 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01079236
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01079236