firstly, before i go on, i cannot emphasise enough that i have next-to-zero knowledge of economic theory, nor do I claim to be extremely well-versed with the ins and outs of the Youth Olympic Games (YOG) and what it entails. also, while as much effort as my 15 minutes or so of preparation allows has been taken to ensure i do not post anything blatantly false, i cannot claim utmost confidence in factual accuracy of this piece which will be rather hastily written. i stand to be challenged and corrected, even persuaded otherwise. just, you know, be nice. anyway this is just some quick research and my personal take on Singapore’s hosting the YOG – that ultimately it just does not seem worth all the fuss and trouble.
now don’t get me wrong, this is not a post blasting the Games per se. i admit to only watching little snippets of the opening ceremony last night (well, the Premier League was going on you know), and yes i was joining many in joking about the event. it was cheesy, and at times it made Singaporeans seem like we are tone-deaf and cannot dance with our two left feet. but the Singapore city skyline at night is just beautiful, and it was really A++ for effort and grandiose planning. speaking of cheesy, go to YouTube and look at the opening ceremony of any other major sporting event, particularly from outside Europe or America, and you’ll get what i mean. they’re all one and the same — kinda Orientalist in nature, overly-eager to showcase the hosts’ culture, and chock-full of garish sounds and colours. nonetheless, for my money, the opening ceremony of the world’s first ever YOG trumped that of this year’s World Cup, arguably THE biggest global sporting event. further to that, i do also think that we should be proud of the fact that to earn the right to host the YOG we had to beat the likes of Athens, Turin and finally Moscow. and i have little doubt that logistically, minor hiccups aside, Singapore’s wonderful ability to *cough* ORGANISE will shine through and the Games would be, for all parties with a specific vested interest, a success.
yet what bothers me, gets my beef if you like, is the amount that has been spent on hosting this event, and the consequent reward for it. establishing a rudimentary framework of analysis, whether a course of action has been “worth it” or not is contingent on whether the means justify the ends. at this point it would be fitting to ask what are the goals, and what are the consequent financial and opportunity costs involved.
i don’t presume that there are financial benefits to be had from hosting the YOG. i do not have figures on how much tourism is boosted, although it can’t really awfully much, and taking a stab in the dark i am also fairly confident that sponsorship has not nearly covered the expenditure of US$284 million (almost 300% over the initial budget). which leads us to quite correctly conclude that perhaps we’re looking at more long-term and intangible benefits, like
“positioning ourselves, in terms of marketing ourselves, in terms of making sure we are on everyone’s radar screen the next time they make an investment decision, the next time they decide to site an international or regional headquarters or the next time they decide to expand their business.” – Vivian Balakrishnan, Minister of Community Development, Youth & Sports
for the purpose of this post, let us take that as the “goal” of us breaking our necks to host this event. firstly, i question if that has been achieved. back home, do Singaporeans care? a Channel News Asia poll of over 6,000 respondents finds 88% of Singaporeans “not interested at all” in the Games. oh, by the way, can you name any 3 athletes competing? i know i can’t. so forgetting that, internationally, do people know/care? i guess i won’t know for sure, and maybe i shall take a straw poll when i’m in England.
looking for an elegant and easy to apply indicator, i searched 25 of the top international news sites around the world — CNN; CBS News; ABCNew; Google News; Reuters; Bloomberg; Yahoo News; BBC News Online; World News; MSNBC; FOXnews; USATODAY.com; CBC News Online; Time.com; The Associated Press; Guardian Unlimited; NewsLink; The New York Times; EmergencyNet News; Consortium News; News.com.au; AfricaNews; allAfrica; NewsAfrica.net; Al Jazeera; — and only TWO of these, Google News and Yahoo News, make ANY mention of the YOG on their front page, and on the Yahoo site i still had to scroll down to find that one mention. having said that, i don’t mean to therefore posit that the YOG is a failure. i’m just saying that it hasn’t exactly set the world alight, which does not exactly bode well for our stated “goal”.
the costs involved in hosting this YOG, currently pegged at US$284 million, has not also exactly made for pleasant reading. the budget for this year’s World Cup in South Africa – US$423 million. simply put, we have spent two-thirds the amount spent on hosting the World Cup, which financially should quite comfortably pay for itself. FIFA announced revenue of US$1.06 BILLION from the World Cup alone, although independent estimates of PROFITS range from US$1-US$2 billion. tourism figures (at least for a month) would have presumably skyrocketed with 2.9 million tickets sold (still over 1 million tourists assuming 2/3 of the attendees were Africans), and an estimated 600 million people — one in ten humans — watched the final between Holland and Spain globally on TV. it’s hard to imagine the YOG having even two-tenths of this reach, which is why US$284 million is to me a bit rich. contrast this again to the FIFA Under-20 World Cup, an event of a similar level to the YOG. the 2009 Under-20 World Cup had a budget of just US$21.47 million, and i would personally argue that the U-20 World Cup generates at least marginally more sporting interest than the YOG with just a tenth of the budget.
to slightly worsen this little scenario i shall just add a snippet on opportunity cost and a personal beef of mine. the welfare budget for the needy is currently US$75 million, and the amount actually spent from this pool is quite some distance less than half. the actual amount varies depending on your source. coupled with that is the lack of help for the lower-middle class of sandwiched individuals in a time when consumer prices for key goods are steadily increasing, resulting in a situation of a fall in REAL income.
it’s naive to try and argue that we should not dabble in anything big until we solve poverty and inflation. and that is not the point of this post. my real point is that hosting the YOG is a huge huge gamble, and one we should probably not have taken on, at least not in the first edition of the Games. the event is still, to many, somewhat experimental commercially and conceptually, with no projections on viewerships and interest to make it viable to potential sponsors. people’s interests are, naturally, more inclined towards watching athletes in their physical prime and at the top of their game, not at an age where many things can still go wrong, because it is true that many budding athletes drop out for various reasons. Coca Cola, the longest-serving corporate sponsor of the Olympics, has stood by the YOG, at least for now. but it calls the SYOG Committee’s determination to host the games “going out on a limb”, and that, i think, quite succinctly captures the point of this post — that it is all a gamble and one i feel we shouldn’t have taken.
I do agree that the amount allocated to the YOG is way overbudgeted and not commensurate with similar events that presumably might spark the same amount of interests among people around the globe. I also agree that while a pretty large sum of the budget is allocated to the needy, when compared to the amount allocated to this commercialised event, it sure doesn’t sound like the government have their priorities right.
However, this will slowly start to make Singapore a permanent red dot on the map, and not mistaken as a village in China or Japan. While many major news companies do not headline the YOG (and who can blame them, the viewership will definitely be lower since the age group of participants are 14-18), we are starting the education and the awareness campaign young, where these thousands of young athletes from God knows where, will finally recognise Singapore not as a God knows where place, but a real city.
We could have chosen to not host this event now, and wait, but methinks they were striking while the iron really was pretty hot, the economy is really picking up, and this work out in the long run, to be economically beneficial (regardless the overbudgeting) and I guess like you, while I am not overly interested in the YOG, but I still feel some form of pride that we are capable enough handling such a major scale phenomenon that is the Olympics.
By: Carol on August 15, 2010
at 10:02 pm
yes but ’tis a pride very expensively bought. :( and well… i just think there are easier and more publicly-equitable ways to put ourselves on the world map.
plus, again while i am no economist, the economy is only picking up if you believe the newspapers, which peg growth to GDP levels. GDP as an indicator sells us very short and it really does not tell us the whole story — like for example how the huge influx of foreign workers has led to lowered production costs, leading to higher profits and thus higher GDP. i used real income in my post, and that is because while wages are rising as they would naturally do at a nominal level, it is not doing so fast enough and for some, the rise in wages are not keeping up with the increase in consumer prices. so while GDP paints a very pretty picture, i’m afraid it’s not complete.
the only way for the YOG to be considered economically beneficial is if it directly leads to increased publicity for Singapore. but i don’t see why we need to spend US$284million to do this! as it stands, i think what the YOG is trying to tell the world, the world already knows. the people who matter, like institutional investors, already know what Singapore has to offer with or without the YOG. screw the kids who fail geography.
:(
By: blueballs on August 15, 2010
at 10:32 pm