The correlation between economic underdevelopment and sport

Abstract

This paper demonstrates the strong relationship that exists between the level of economic development in a country and the level of its sporting development. In particular, developing countries are plagued with a shortage of physical education and sport for all programmes, a lack of financing for sport, few sport facilities and little equipment, a “muscle drain” to developed counties, and no capacity to host major sporting events. An ordered‐logit model estimation shows that the probability for a country to win medals at the Olympics increases with GDP per capita and population. On the other hand, sport in the Third World cannot escape to professionalism, multinational sponsors, media and corruption, nor to the relocation of the sporting goods industry in low cost labour areas. Economic development is the only basic recipe against sporting underdevelopment. However, other solutions such as: the UNESCO effort in favour of physical education, sport for all and traditional sports in developing countries; foreign aid for participation in international sport events; and fines for instances of corruption in sport and the use of child labour in the sports goods industry are presented. The main suggestion is a “Coubertobin tax” which is designed to hinder the transfers of teenage and younger athletes from developing countries, the tax income would reside in a fund for sports development in the home developing countries. “No queremos goles, queremos frijoles”