Olympics: How many medals will we win in Paris? – July 22, 2024 – Why? Portuguese Economics

As we approach Paris Olympicswe return to the usual question: What are our chances of winning a medal? Newspapers, television stations and specialized websites ask experts from the most diverse sports to give their opinions on outstanding Brazilian athletes in each sport. Our aim is not to replace expert opinion, but to try to predict the total number of medals. Paris Use statistical models that do not use any direct information about the athlete’s performance.

oh Model It was proposed 20 years ago by economists Andrew Bernard and Megan Bass. They estimate the proportion of medals won by countries as a function of a finite set of variables – population, per capita income, number of medals won in previous games, and the identity of the host country. They still use the fact whether the country is communist or not, but since this is not applicable at the moment, we ignore that information.

First, let me explain: What is the logic behind these variables? Population is important because the larger the country, the greater the chance of producing high-level athletes. This is the law of large numbers. Per capita income may be relevant because richer countries have more resources to invest. Sportyleading to better Olympic performance.

The host country should have some advantages due to the pressure from fans, the greater motivation for athletes to do well at home, and the extra investment made by the country itself to achieve better performance. Finally, the medal count from the previous Games reflects the persistence of the process – after all, a good generation of athletes tends to participate in several Olympics.

We then follow the same procedure as Bernard and Busse, using 1996 CompetitionThis period is interesting because there is not much change in the grouping of countries in the world. Qualitatively, our results are very similar to theirs. The variables discussed above have the expected signs and are strongly correlated with the proportion of medals won by different countries (in the jargon, they are statistically significant).

The next step is to use this model and provide more up-to-date information. Predicting Paris’ performance in 2024To make our projections, we use population and per capita income for 2022, a year for which data are available for most countries. France As host country, we use the following results Tokyo-2020 Performance at the last Olympic Games.

We don’t know exactly how many medals will be awarded, so we use the Tokyo Olympics total (1,080 medals) as a guide. The top 20 countries are predicted to be:

It will be interesting to return to this table in mid-August, when the Paris Olympics are over. We can already foresee significant errors in the forecasts – Russiadue to the invasion, the number of athletes will be very small Ukraine (hence the asterisk)This should affect the proportion of medals from other countries, where competition will be less intense. It is also worth noting that Cuba Since GDP data is unavailable, it does not appear in the table (and would normally receive a lot of medals), which makes calculation of the forecast not feasible.

In 2021, We did a similar exercise for the Tokyo Olympicsthe model determined Brazil’s performance – 21 medals. In Paris, he again predicted 21 medals. This is not surprising. It is estimated that past performance has a strong influence in explaining the number of medals – in other words, the process is very persistent.

We will return to this discussion in a few weeks to compare the forecast with the reality.

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