Mega-sport events and inbound tourism: New data, methods and evidence

Abstract

Mega-sport events continue to attract interest from potential hosts around the world. The belief is that these events bring the host city and country not only prestige but also economic benefits, notably tourism. A decade ago, Fourie and Santana-Gallego (2011) published a seminal paper that defined a gravity model for tourism demand to estimate the impact of six mega-sport events on international tourism for the period 1995-2006. This paper updates and expands their analysis by adding more observations (for the period 1995-2019), more events (eleven mega-sport events), testing new hypotheses and by using more advanced econometric methods. New results confirm some earlier findings, question others and reveal that, because of the selection panel's preference for developed countries to host mega-sport events, the impact of these events on inbound tourism is likely to be smaller in future.