Mega-events impact on economic growth: Analysis of the South African World Cup

According to the literature, a sport mega-event such as the Football World Cup or the Olympic Games has many advantages for the organizing country, not only in economic terms but also in other areas. This paper analyses the possible impact of the South African economy of the 2010 World Cup. In order to do so, it studies the former 6 World Cups obtaining the positive differential in terms of the economic growth that has been generated in those 5 or 3 key years that are distributed before and after the year of the World Cup. A regression "trend" is generated to each of the 7 countries that have hosted the last 6 World Cups, and the research makes a projection of two years (2011-2012) for South Africa. The results, confirming previous findings, show that four of the seven economies in the last World Cups taken in consideration, had a clear impact on the year of the World Cup. In the South African case, after registering a pre-World Cup period 2004-2008 particularly buoyant, further developments should be expected for the 2011-2012 period.