Comment on “Asian Participation and Performance at the Olympic Games”

• Author: Yukinobu Kitamura
• Published date: 01 January 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/aepr.12119
• Date: 01 January 2016

Comment on “Asian Participation and

Performance at the Olympic Games”

Yukinobu KITAMURA†

Hitotsubashi University

JEL codes: J16, L83, F69, Z13

Noland and Stahler (2016) shed light on Asian participation and performances at the

Olympic Games. This paper presents a wide range of fact findings regarding Asian

Olympic performances, including the performances of three outstanding Northeast

Asian countries, China, Japan and Korea; the better performances of Asian women than

men; and the better performances in weight-stratified contests, such as wrestling, judo,

taekwondo, and weightlifting, and in size-free games,such as table tennis, shooting, bad-

minton, archery, and gymnastics. I broadly agree with what Noland and Stahler discover

and their forecasts for the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games.

As is often argued with positive economics, the proof of a good theory depends on its

forecasting (predictive) power. We need to wait to see whether Noland and Stahler’s

approach will still be justifiable after the 2016 Olympics. At this stage, we can say that

medal forecasting would be quite accurate for three major countries – China, Japan, and

Korea – while those for the rest of Asian countries would contain substantial errors.I wi ll

give some reasons in the following.

I have two broad questions concerning with this paper at this moment. First, Noland

and Stahler rely on Bernard and Busse (2004), Johnson and Ali (2004), and Otamendi

and Doncel (2014) for their theoretical framework and econometric estimation

methods. Their empirical approach is used extensively in this research field. These

authors use the production function approach to the Olympic caliber athletes by assum-

ing that (i) the expected medal share accruing to a country should be equal to its share of

the total population of countries participating in the Olympics, and that (ii) the produc-

tion function for generating Olympic caliber athletes for a country iin year trequires

people, money, and some organizational ability. In other words, the authors assume that

talent is distributed equally across countries, and the production technology is basically

the same across countries except for constant terms (including dummies for regions, the

host country, and the communist block dummy). As the actual Olympic records show,

many individual sports require physiological advantages, so that competition itself may

not be fair from the Asian point of view. This reflects the fact that talent is not distrib-

uted equally across countries. Production technology of caliber athletes is also quite dif-

ferent among countries due to various sociocultural differences. In addition, as we know

from the industrial organization literature, market share competition depends on the

†Correspondence: Yukinobu Kitamura, Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University,

2-1 Naka, Kunitachi, Tokyo 186-8603, Japan. Email: kitamura@ier.hit-u.ac.jp

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doi: 10.1111/aepr.12119 Asian Economic Policy Review (2016) 11, 91–92

© 2016 Japan Center for Economic Research 91