EN BUSCA DEL ORO ¿Qué determina el éxito en competencias deportivas internacionales?

This paper examines the determinants of sporting success of different countries in the Pan-American Games during the 1959-1999 period. The data consists of a panel of participant countries, where the variable of interest corresponds to the number of medals obtained by each country in each of the Games. The empirical model assumes that international sporting success depends on the effort and resources devoted to this activity as well as resource endowment, including population size, GDP, infant mortality, the percentage of Afro-Americans in the population. A set of dummy variables identifying whether the country is a host of the competition or a neighbor country were also included. Since the number of medals a country wins will depend on the effort and resources of the other countries in competition, the econometric estimate must take into account the variance-covariance matrix of the correlation of errors among countries. The results show that population size and GDP are not significantly correlated with the number of medals obtained in Pan-American Games when unobservable effects are accounted for. These results would be consistent with the hypothesis that more than size or wealth of a country what really determine success in international sports competition is the investment made by countries in developing such activities.