Celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Barcelona Olympics

Barcelona celebrates these days the 25th anniversary of the Olympic Games. This event was hugely popular and an organizational success. A sub-literature in economics emerged more or less after those games concluding that these events have more costs than benefits for society, which is why some cities like Hamburg, Boston and Oslo have withdrawn from bidding races. Unfortunately this literature has not reached the general public in Spain. I believe there is no contradiction between deeming Barcelona 92 a success and accepting that in general Olympic Games are bad economic propositions. This is the same view that is taken by Andrew Zimbalist in Circus Maximus. I tried to develop it in a joint paper with Eloi Serrano that was published last year. This is the abstract of the paper: "An extensive literature mostly developed after the Barcelona Olympic Games has questioned the existence of net economic benefits arising from the organization (with significant amounts of public resources) of major sporting events such as the Olympics, although some studies still defend their positive impact. Host cities tend to become hostage of the governing bodies organizing the games. The Barcelona Olympic Games were exceptionally successful but still suffered from cost overruns, white elephants and the exaggeration of social benefits as it is usual in many mega sporting events. We report about the socio-political and economic considerations that surrounded the initial project of Barcelona 1992, and we evaluate the uniqueness of these games, including the legacy of infrastructures and sports facilities. Barcelona, a relatively rich city, was emerging from a long centralist dictatorship when the games were initially planned. It had many urban deficits and the games were used as a catalyst to coordinate public and private agents in a complex society that was in a fast process of decentralization. The games had enormous social support. Although it may be argued that the public funds could have been used in alternative projects, it is hard to think that this degree of coordination and support could have been achieved for them."