Economists Victor Matheson and Robert Baade outlined the potential benefits as “the short-run benefits of tourist spending during the Games the long-run benefits of the ‘Olympic legacy’ which might include improvements in infrastructure and increased trade, foreign investment or tourism after the Games and intangible benefits such as the ‘feel-good effect’ or civic pride.” But what happened in Tokyo is part of a larger trend - a 2020 paper by Oxford economist Bent Flyvbjerg found that “every Olympics since 1960 has run over budget, at an average of 172 percent in real terms, the highest overrun on record for any type of megaproject.” In other words, he found there’s something specifically wrong with the Olympics bidding process, even compared to other boondoggles.Īnd it’s not just the costs some of the supposed benefits of hosting the Olympics have come under scrutiny by locals and economists alike. The city had to postpone the Games for a year after Covid-19 made hosting the international event a nonstarter, and they won’t receive the local tourism boom that usually accompanies the Olympics. But competing estimates from a national audit board and national newspapers contend it could be nearly $30 billion. Local organizers have disputed that total - though they admitted in December 2019 that costs had risen to $12.6 billion. By summer 2020, an Oxford economist told the Associated Press that Tokyo’s costs had already more than doubled to $15.84 billion.
In 2013, when it bid for the 2020 Summer Games, Tokyo thought it would be spending $7.3 billion. The Olympics are a bad deal for host cities.
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