Skip to main content
Log in

Olympic medals as an indicator of social welfare

  • Published:
Social Indicators Research Aims and scope Submit manuscript

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.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

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.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hicks, N. and P. Streeten: 1979, ‘Indicators of development: the search for a basic needs yardstick’, World Development 7, pp. 567–580.

    Google Scholar 

  • Johnston, D. F.: 1988, ‘Towards a comprehensive ‘quality of life’ index’, Social Indicators Research 20, pp. 473–496.

    Google Scholar 

  • Larson, D. A. and W. T. Wilford: 1979, ‘The physical quality of life index: A useful social indicator?’, World Development 7, pp. 581–584.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lind, N. C.: 1992, ‘Some thoughts on the human development index’, Social Indicators Research 27, pp. 89–101.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lind, N. C.: 1993, ‘A compound index of national development’, Social Indicators Research 28, pp. 267–284.

    Google Scholar 

  • 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.

    Google Scholar 

  • Slottje, D. J.: 1991, ‘Measuring the quality of life across countries’, The Review of Economics and Statistics 73, pp. 684–693.

    Google Scholar 

  • 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.

    Google Scholar 

  • United Nations Development Program, 1990, Human Development Report 1990. (Oxford University Press, New York/Oxford).

    Google Scholar 

  • 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).

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Rights and permissions

Reprints 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

Download citation

  • Accepted:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01079236

Keywords

Navigation