英语论文网

Introduction
Over recent years there has been a marked contrast between the discussions
around the economic impact of major sports events in North America on the
one hand and most of the rest of the world on the other. In the USA the sports
strategies of cities in the USA have largely been based on infrastructure
(stadium) investment for professional team sports, in particular, American football,
baseball, basketball, and ice hockey. Over the last decade cities have offered
greater and greater incentives for these professional teams to move from their
existing host cities by offering to build a new stadium to house them. The teams
sit back and let the host and competing cities bid up the price. They either move
to the city offering the best deal or they accept the counter offer invariably put
to them by their existing hosts. This normally involves the host city building a
brand new stadium to replace the existing one which may only be ten or fifteen
years old. The result is that at the end of the 1990s there were thirty major
stadium construction projects in progress, around one-third of the total professional
sports infrastructure, but over half of all professional teams in the USA
have expressed dissatisfaction with their current facilities.
Baade (2003) argues that since 1987 approximately 80 per cent of the professional
sports facilities in the United States will have been replaced or have
undergone major renovation with the new facilities costing more than $19 billion
in total, and the public providing $13.6 billion, or 71 per cent, of that amount.
The use of taxpayers money to subsidize profit-making professional sports
teams is justified on the basis that such investment of public money is a worthwhile
investment since it is clearly outweighed by the stream of economic activity
that is generated by having a professional sports team resident in the city.
Such justifications are often backed up by economic impact studies that show
that the spending of sports tourists in the host city more than justifies such a
public subsidy. Crompton (1995, 2001) has illustrated that such studies have
often been seriously methodologically flawed, and the real economic benefit of
such visitor spending is often well below that specified in such studies. This is
particularly the case given the need for such huge infrastructure investment
needed to attract the professional teams.
In Europe, however, city sport strategies have concentrated more on attracting
a series of major sports events, such as World or European Championships,
again justified on the economic impact generated through hosting such events.
Whereas many American sports economists (eg, Baade, 1996; Noll &
Zimbalist, 1997; Coates & Humphreys, 1999) now consistently agree that studies
show no significant direct economic impact on the host cities from the recent
stadium developments, it is not so evident that European style hosting of major
sports events is not economically beneficial to the host cities. This chapter looks
at ten major sports events, all World or European Championships hosted by
UK cities over recent years, all of which have been studied by the current
authors. The difference from the North American situation is that these events
move around from city t本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。