اثرات بازار کار بخشی جام جهانی 2006

Using the case of the 2006 FIFA World Cup, this study is the first to test the employment effects of a mega-sporting event on the basis of data that combines both regional and sectoral data. It is also the first study of sporting events to use a semi-parametric test method. Earlier studies on the World Cup could hardly identify any employment effects. In contrast, we find a small but significant positive employment effect on the hospitality sector.

“And the winner is … Deutschland!” On June 6th, 2000, these were the words of FIFA President Joseph Blatter as he announced the host of the 2006 FIFA World Cup. The related investment costs for new construction or major renovations totalled nearly €1.6 billion for the twelve stadiums (FIFA, 2006). An additional €1.6 billion was invested in stadium-related infrastructure in the host cities. In some other cities that had unsuccessfully participated in a national competition, each hoping to become a World Cup host city, another €515 million had been spent on stadium construction. Before the 2006 World Cup in Germany, a series of analyses was published indicating that the investments related to staging the World Cup and the expenditures of the expected one to two million foreign visitors would markedly affect income and employment. The evidence from the few existing ex-post studies of the 2006 FIFA World Cup is less optimistic. Using poll data, Kurscheidt et al. (2008) calculated World Cup-induced (substitution-adjusted) consumer spending of €3.2 billion. This seems to be an impressive figure at first glance, but if one compares it to Germany's GDP in 2006, which totalled €2325 billion, then there was only a small income impact of 0.14%. Thus, it is not surprising that scholarly researchers using aggregated macroeconomic time series hardly succeeded in identifying any significant economic impact from the event. On such an aggregated level, any positive impact of a mega-event would almost certainly be subsumed by normal fluctuations in the economy and would, from a statistical point of view, disappear into the noise.

This study is the first to test for employment effects of the 2006 World Cup on the basis of data that are regionalised and sectoralised. To our knowledge, it is also the first study to operate on this basis for a sports event outside the USA. So far, studies of the 2006 World Cup that used only regionalised but not sectoralised data could not identify any employment effects (Feddersen et al., 2009 and Hagn and Maennig, 2009). Two different DD approaches were employed: a flexible partially semi-parametric model and a more traditional DD model. To account for endogenous selection bias of the host cities, both DD approaches were combined with propensity score matching. Some weak evidence for a World Cup effect can be found in selected industries like “Hospitality” Using a matched DD approach controlling especially for an effect lasting only one quarter, a short term effect cannot be generally confirmed. Only the hospitality sector, which is one of the industries predestined to be affected by a mega-sporting event, showed a significantly positive short-term effect. In this sector, in the second quarter of 2006, an employment increase of 4.2% was observed. This effect can be translated into about 2,600 additional jobs within the German hospitality industries (hotels, food services, and drinking establishments), a far cry from the five-digit employment effects predicted in most ex-ante studies. Furthermore, both approaches reject the hypothesis of a long-term and persistent employment boost caused by the 2006 World Cup.