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

• Date: 01 January 2016
• Published date: 01 January 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/aepr.12120
• Author: Yosuke Yasuda

Comment on “Asian Participation and

Performance at the Olympic Games”

Yosuke YASUDA†

Osaka University

JEL codes: J16, L83, F69, Z13

How can we explain the historical presence and performance of Asian countries at the

Olympics? What are the medal forecasts for the next Summer Games to be held in Rio in

2016? Noland and Stahler (2016) tackle these significant issues by employing standard

empirical methods. Specifically, they conduct a variety of regressions that estimate each

country’s share of (1) athletes and (2) medals at the Summer Olympics between 1960

and 2012, with a primary focus on Asian countries. On (2), in addition to the (i) total

medal estimation, further investigations such as (ii) female performance and (iii) sport-

specific analysis are elaborated. Finally, the authors also derive (3) medal forecasts for

Rio 2016. Below I provide a brief summary of the paper and a few comments.

With regard to participation and success, the three northeast Asian countries, China,

Japan, and South Korea (NEAs henceforth), are evidently outstanding. At the London

Olympics in 2012, for example, China ranked second,Japan sixth, and South Korea ninth

in terms of the total medals won. Because of such exclusive presence of NEAs, Noland

and Stahler explicitly divide Asian countries into two groups, NEAs and non-NEAs.

Noland and Stahler’s main findings are summarized as follows.

Athletic participation is positively associated with the following variables: per capita

income, population, status as a current host, status as a communist country, and the

average years of schooling. While the NEAs dummy is insignificant, the non-NEAs

dummy has an estimated coefficient that is negative and significant. This implies that

non-NEAs have an unusually low payoff to income or population.

To estimate the total medals won, the framework of Bernard and Busse (2004) is

applied. Using variants of Tobit models, Noland and Stahler show that almost the same

factors as for the empirical analysis for participation are positive determinants of the

medal share. As before, NEAs conform to the international norm, while the rest of Asia

encounters decidedly less success in competition; further analysis of female performance

indicates that Asian women generally do better than men, which consequently suggests

that non-NEAs underperformance is mainly due to men, not women; and the sports-

specific analysis reveals that Asian performance is highly uneven across events.

Noland and Stahler also make out of sample forecasts, and predict that NEAs will

continue to improve their performance at Rio 2016. Although China will still be in

†Correspondence: Yosuke Yasuda, Department of Economics, Osaka University, 1-7

Machikaneyama, Toyonaka, Osaka 560-0043, Japan. Email: yasuda@econ.osaka-u.ac.jp

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doi: 10.1111/aepr.12120 Asian Economic Policy Review (2016) 11, 93–94

© 2016 Japan Center for Economic Research 93