It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Sunday, February 25, 2024
Ancient Megalith Found in Peru Is One of The Oldest in The Americas
Remains of the circular plaza. (Toohey et al., Science Advances, 2024)
A century or so before the pyramids graced the Egyptian horizon, around the same time as the erection of Stonehenge, hunters and gatherers half a world away were building megalithic stone structures to rival those of farmers.
One of the earliest examples to date – an 18 meter (about 60 foot) wide circular plaza made from large upright stones – was recently excavated in a valley of northern Peru called Callacpuma.
Findings from the ancient site, which was originally found nearly six decades before, now suggest that the plaza is around 4,750 years old. That makes it one of the oldest monolithic structures found in all of the Americas.
Not only was the monumental structure built before the true rise of farming in this region, it also predates technology like ceramics.
"In the northern highlands of Peru, the people that built the plaza at Callacpuma may have begun to experiment with food production, but they were also probably still relatively mobile hunter-gatherers," write the archaeologists behind the study.
The plaza may, therefore, be a long-lost meeting place of early nomadic societies, coming together to negotiate new group identities for the first time.
"[The Callacpuma plaza] is a critical early example of collective construction, place building, and social integration among people in the Andes," writes the team of researchers.
The remarkable site is bound by two concentric walls, constructed from unshaped and unmortared megalithic stones, each of which was probably chiseled out of exposed bedrock roughly 50 meters away.
Once these large and heavy slabs were transported to the site, the stones were tipped vertically and placed in close succession to one another. The circular structure they formed held two entrances and contained two or three rooms.
The style of architecture is rare for the region, archaeologists say.
Radiocarbon dating of charcoal found nearby suggests the plaza was used on occasion between 2632 and 2884 BCE, probably for religious or social purposes.
To bookend those dates for perspective, the Inca built Machu Picchu in the 15th century around 1450 CE and the Maya are thought to have built their earliest monoliths between 1050 and 750 BCE.
An older megalithic structure found on the Peruvian coast, called Sechin Bajo, contains a sunken plaza built around 3000 BCE. But while older, this monument was made from stone-faced walls filled with cobbles and soil – a different architectural style.
The plaza at Callapcuma could be an offshoot of similar, early plaza-building traditions in the region. The site's discovery supports the emerging idea that farming is not necessarily required for human societies to build permanent, megalithic structures.
To assume that nomadic hunters and gatherers lack the incentive or skill to accomplish such feats is an outdated perspective that is facing growing scrutiny.
After all, the oldest known megalith in the world, called Göbekli Tepe, was built 11,000 years ago in what is now Turkey by a society of hunter-gatherers. Experts think these people probably came together at the site to farewell their dead or to stage sacred ceremonies.
"As with the case of early monumental collective architecture outside Andean South America, for instance at Gobekli Tepe," argue the researchers of the Callacpuma site, "the construction of monumental ritual architecture in the Late Preceramic of the coastal and highland central Andes represented a shifting social world perhaps involving a change from small group-related belief systems to more collective and regionally focused belief and action."
The circle of stones may not look like much today, but they tell an important story about humankind.
NEW YORK — Fifty-five percent of Americans say they’d “break up” with a brand if they found out it wasn’t eco-friendly, according to a new survey. A recent poll of 2,000 adults finds that 44 percent feel more emotionally invested in companies that show sustainable business practices.
According to the data, Americans are predicted to spend 33 percent more on green products from sustainable businesses in 2024 than in 2023. Consumers plan to spend an average of $12,000 on eco-friendly products this year, up from the reported $9,000 in the past year on sustainable products including electric cars, household cleaners, small and large electronics, and appliances.
Commissioned by Propel Software and conducted by OnePoll, the study finds that 68 percent of men and 55 percent of women say eco-friendly products or causes are important when making purchasing decisions. Nearly half of all respondents (46%) consider themselves “brand loyal” and strongly prefer to buy from specific companies over their competitors. Almost one in four Americans (23%) refuse to purchase a product or brand solely because it’s not environmentally friendly.
(Credit: SWNS)
“Transparency is important to consumers, and brands should take note if they want customers to continue to be brand loyal. The majority of respondents (65%) say they will look for environmental claims when making a purchase,” says spokesperson Ross Meyercord, CEO of Propel Software, in a statement. “Today’s consumers are savvy and not easily tricked, as 42 percent said they can tell when a company is trying to ‘greenwash’ what they do.”
Forty-five percent of U.S. consumers report that if they discovered a favorite brand was “greenwashing” products, they would likely purchase from an eco-friendly competitor instead.
Consumers are looking at product packaging (47%), on brands’ websites (35%), and via advertisements (21%) as the top places to determine which brands are green and which ones aren’t when making purchases.
Popular eco-friendly items people plan to purchase in the next year include products made from recycled materials (36%), organic or locally sourced groceries (35%) and energy-efficient home appliances (24%).
“Data shows consumers, regardless of political affiliation, are putting their hard-earned money towards brands and products that elevate environmental causes,” says Meyercord. “And, those brands that accurately communicate their environmental practices to consumers are being rewarded with loyal customers that are spending more with them. Green companies partnering with green consumers makes for a happy, healthy planet.”
Survey methodology:
This random double-opt-in survey of 2,000 general population Americans was commissioned by Propel Software between January 9th and January 24th, 2024. It was conducted by market research company OnePoll, whose team members are members of the Market Research Society and have corporate membership to the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) and the European Society for Opinion and Marketing Research (ESOMAR).
Productivity Surge Helps Explain US Economy's Surprising Resilience
A worker at Reata Engineering and Machine Works programs a Mazak Variaxis machine used to make semiconductor pieces, Feb. 15, 2024, in Englewood, Colo. Reata has invested heavily in software that automates its manufacturing processes.
WASHINGTON —
Trying to keep up with customer demand, Batesville Tool & Die began seeking 70 people to hire last year. It wasn't easy. Attracting factory workers to a community of 7,300 in the Indiana countryside was a tough sell, especially having to compete with big-name manufacturers nearby like Honda and Cummins Engine.
Job seekers were scarce.
"You could count on one hand how many people in the town were unemployed," said Jody Fledderman, the CEO. "It was just crazy.''
Batesville Tool & Die managed to fill just 40 of its vacancies.
Enter the robots. The company invested in machines that could mimic human workers and in vision systems, which helped its robots "see" what they were doing.
The Batesville experience has been replicated countlessly across the United States the past couple of years. Worker shortages have led many companies to invest in machines. They've also been training the workers they do have to use advanced technology so they can produce more with less.
The result has been an unexpected productivity boom, which helps explain a great economic mystery: How has the world's largest economy stayed so healthy, with brisk growth and low unemployment, despite brutally high interest rates that are intended to tame inflation but that typically cause a recession?
To economists, strong productivity growth provides an almost magical elixir. When companies roll out more efficient technology, their workers can become more productive: They increase their output per hour. A result is that companies can often boost profits and raise pay without having to jack up prices. Inflation can remain in check.
The Fed's aggressive streak of rate hikes — 11 of them starting in March 2022 — managed to bring inflation from a four-decade high of 9.1% to 3.1%. But, to the surprise to the economists who'd forecast a recession, the higher borrowing costs have caused little economic hardship.
A Halter robot collects a finished piece for blood pressure pumps from a Mazak Integrex at Reata Engineering and Machine Works, Feb. 15, 2024, in Englewood, Colo.
Perhaps the likeliest explanation is the greater efficiencies that companies like Batesville Tool & Die have managed to achieve. Before productivity began its resurgent growth last year, a rule of thumb was that average hourly pay could rise no more than 3.5% annually for inflation to stay within the Fed's 2% target. That would mean that today's roughly 4% average annual pay growth would have to shrink. Higher productivity means there's now more leeway for wage growth to stay elevated without igniting inflation.
The productivity boom marks a shift from the pre-pandemic years, when annual productivity growth averaged a tepid 1.5%. Everything changed as the economy rocketed out of the 2020 pandemic recession with unexpected vigor, and businesses struggled to re-hire the many workers they had shed.
The resulting worker shortage sent wages surging. Inflation jumped, too, as factories and ports buckled under the strain of rising consumer orders.
Desperate, many companies turned to automation. The efficiency payoff began to arrive almost a year ago. Labor productivity rose at a 3.6% annual pace from last April through June, 4.9% from July through September and 3.2% from October through December.
A Halter robot collects a finished piece for blood pressure pumps from a Mazak Integrex at Reata Engineering and Machine Works, Feb. 15, 2024, in Englewood, Colo.
At Reata Engineering & Machine Works, "efficiency was kind of forced on us,'' CEO Grady Cope said. With the job market roaring, the company, based in Englewood, Colorado, couldn't hire fast enough. Meantime, its customers were starting to balk at paying higher prices.
So Reata installed robots and other technology. Software allowed it to automate the delivery of price quotes to customers. That process used to require two weeks. Now, it can be done in 24 hours.
Many economists and business people say they're hopeful that the productivity boom can continue. Artificial intelligence, they note, is only beginning to penetrate factory floors, warehouses, stores and offices and could accelerate efficiency gains.
Automation raises fears that machines will replace human workers, killing jobs. Some workers supplanted by robots do often struggle to find new work and end up settling for lower pay.
Yet history suggests that in the long run, technological improvements actually create more jobs than they destroy. People are needed to build, upgrade, repair and operate sophisticated machines. Some displaced workers are trained to shift into such jobs. And that transition is likely to be eased this time by the retirement of the vast baby boom generation, which is causing labor shortages.
Some of today's productivity gains may be coming not just from advanced technology but also from more satisfied workers. The tight labor markets of the past three years allowed Americans to change jobs and find others that pay better and make them happier and more productive.
Justin Thompson, of Kalamazoo, Michigan, felt burned out by his job as a police officer, with its 16-hour workdays ."I was literally running myself into the ground,'' he said.
Thompson's wife saw a job posting for operations manager at a charter airline. Even without airline experience, his wife felt he could use skills he gains as a Marine Corps infantryman — handling logistics for missions — during tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
She was right. Omni Air International hired him in 2019.
Thompson, 43, loves the new job, which allows him to work from home when he's not traveling. And his Marine experience — which included developing ways to improve efficiency — has proved invaluable.
Other workers have switched from low-skill jobs to those that allow them to be more productive.
At Reata Engineering, staffers were trained to use new sophisticated equipment.
"The whole point is not to lay people off,'' said Cope, the CEO of Reata Engineering. "The point is to make people do jobs that are more interesting'' — and pay better, too.
Have a look at the whos, whats and whens of leap year through time
by Leanne Italie
A calendar shows the month of February, including leap day, Feb. 29, on Saturday, Feb. 24, 2024, in Glenside, Pa., Saturday, Feb. 24, 2024. Credit: AP Photo/Matt Rourke
Leap year. It's a delight for the calendar and math nerds among us. So how did it all begin and why?
Have a look at some of the numbers, history and lore behind the (not quite) every four year phenom that adds a 29th day to February.
By the numbers
The math is mind-boggling in a layperson sort of way and down to fractions of days and minutes. There's even a leap second occasionally, but there's no hullabaloo when that happens.
The thing to know is that leap year exists, in large part, to keep the months in sync with annual events, including equinoxes and solstices, according to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.
It's a correction to counter the fact that Earth's orbit isn't precisely 365 days a year. The trip takes about six hours longer than that, NASA says.
Contrary to what some might believe, however, not every four years is a leaper. Adding a leap day every four years would make the calendar longer by more than 44 minutes, according to the National Air & Space Museum.
Later, on a calendar yet to come (we'll get to it), it was decreed that years divisible by 100 not follow the four-year leap day rule unless they are also divisible by 400, the JPL notes. In the past 500 years, there was no leap day in 1700, 1800 and 1900, but 2000 had one. In the next 500 years, if the practice is followed, there will be no leap day in 2100, 2200, 2300 and 2500.
A calendar shows the month of February, including leap day, Feb. 29, on Friday, Feb. 23, 2024, in San Diego. Credit: AP Photo/Gregory Bull
Still with us?
The next leap years are 2028, 2032 and 2036.
Who came up with leap year?
The short answer: It evolved.
Ancient civilizations used the cosmos to plan their lives, and there are calendars dating back to the Bronze Age. They were based on either the phases of the moon or the sun, as various calendars are today. Usually they were "lunisolar," using both.
Now hop on over to the Roman Empire and Julius Caesar. He was dealing with major seasonal drift on calendars used in his neck of the woods. They dealt badly with drift by adding months. He was also navigating a vast array of calendars starting in a vast array of ways in the vast Roman Empire.
He introduced his Julian calendar in 46 BCE. It was purely solar and counted a year at 365.25 days, so once every four years an extra day was added. Before that, the Romans counted a year at 355 days, at least for a time.
The 29th of February is shown on a calendar during a leap year, in Glenside, Pa., Saturday, Feb. 24, 2024. Credit: AP Photo/Matt Rourke
But still, under Julius, there was drift. There were too many leap years! The solar year isn't precisely 365.25 days! It's 365.242 days, said Nick Eakes, an astronomy educator at the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
Thomas Palaima, a classics professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said adding periods of time to a year to reflect variations in the lunar and solar cycles was done by the ancients. The Athenian calendar, he said, was used in the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries with 12 lunar months.
That didn't work for seasonal religious rites. The drift problem led to "intercalating" an extra month periodically to realign with lunar and solar cycles, Palaima said.
The Julian calendar was 0.0078 days (11 minutes and 14 seconds) longer than the tropical year, so errors in timekeeping still gradually accumulated, according to NASA. But stability increased, Palaima said.
The Julian calendar was the model used by the Western world for hundreds of years. Enter Pope Gregory XIII, who calibrated further. His Gregorian calendar took effect in the late 16th century. It remains in use today and, clearly, isn't perfect or there would be no need for leap year. But it was a big improvement, reducing drift to mere seconds.
Why did he step in? Well, Easter. It was coming later in the year over time, and he fretted that events related to Easter like the Pentecost might bump up against pagan festivals. The pope wanted Easter to remain in the spring.
He eliminated some extra days accumulated on the Julian calendar and tweaked the rules on leap day. It's Pope Gregory and his advisers who came up with the really gnarly math on when there should or shouldn't be a leap year.
"If the solar year was a perfect 365.25 then we wouldn't have to worry about the tricky math involved," Eakes said.
The 29th of February is shown on a calendar during a leap year, in Glenside, Pa., Saturday, Feb. 24, 2024. Credit: AP Photo/Matt Rourke
What's the deal with leap year and marriage?
Bizarrely, leap day comes with lore about women popping the marriage question to men. It was mostly benign fun, but it came with a bite that reinforced gender roles.
There's distant European folklore. One story places the idea of women proposing in fifth century Ireland, with St. Bridget appealing to St. Patrick to offer women the chance to ask men to marry them, according to historian Katherine Parkin in a 2012 paper in the Journal of Family History.
Nobody really knows where it all began.
In 1904, syndicated columnist Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer, aka Dorothy Dix, summed up the tradition this way: "Of course people will say ... that a woman's leap year prerogative, like most of her liberties, is merely a glittering mockery."
The pre-Sadie Hawkins tradition, however serious or tongue-in-cheek, could have empowered women but merely perpetuated stereotypes. The proposals were to happen via postcard, but many such cards turned the tables and poked fun at women instead.
Advertising perpetuated the leap year marriage game. A 1916 ad by the American Industrial Bank and Trust Co. read thusly: "This being Leap Year day, we suggest to every girl that she propose to her father to open a savings account in her name in our own bank."
There was no breath of independence for women due to leap day.
Leap years were created to keep Earth's seasons in line with a human calendar. Credit: AP Digital Embed
Should we pity the leaplings?
Being born in a leap year on a leap day certainly is a talking point. But it can be kind of a pain from a paperwork perspective. Some governments and others requiring forms to be filled out and birthdays to be stated stepped in to declare what date was used by leaplings for such things as drivers licenses, whether Feb. 28 or March 1.
Technology has made it far easier for leap babies to jot down their Feb. 29 milestones, though there can be glitches in terms of health systems, insurance policies and with other businesses and organization that don't have that date built in.
There are about 5 million people worldwide who share the leap birthday out of about 8 billion people on the planet. Shelley Dean, 23, in Seattle, Washington, chooses a rosy attitude about being a leapling. Growing up, she had normal birthday parties each year, but an extra special one when leap years rolled around. Since, as an adult, she marks that non-leap period between Feb. 28 and March 1 with a low-key "whew."
This year is different.
"It will be the first birthday that I'm going to celebrate with my family in eight years, which is super exciting, because the last leap day I was on the other side of the country in New York for college," she said. "It's a very big year."
A calendar shows the month of February, including leap day, Feb. 29, on Saturday, Feb. 24, 2024, in Glenside, Pa., Saturday, Feb. 24, 2024. Credit: AP Photo/Matt Rourke
What would happen without a leap day?
Eventually, nothing good in terms of when major events fall, when farmers plant and how seasons align with the sun and the moon.
"Without the leap years, after a few hundred years we will have summer in November," said Younas Khan, a physics instructor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. "Christmas will be in summer. There will be no snow. There will be no feeling of Christmas."
Tackling climate change by planting trees has an intuitive appeal. They absorb the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the atmosphere without using expensive technology.
The suggestion that you can plant trees to offset your carbon emissions is widespread. Many businesses, from those selling shoes to booze, now offer to plant a tree with each purchase, and more than 60 countries have signed up to the Bonn Challenge, which aims to restore degraded and deforested landscapes.
However, expanding tree cover could affect the climate in complex ways. Using models of the Earth's atmosphere, land and oceans, we have simulated widescale future forestation. Our new study shows that this increases atmospheric carbon dioxide removal, beneficial for tackling climate change. But side-effects, including changes to other greenhouse gases and the reflectivity of the land surface, may partially oppose this.
Our findings suggest that while forestation—the restoration and expansion of forests—can play a role in tackling climate change, its potential may be smaller than previously thought.
When forestation occurs alongside other climate change mitigation strategies, such as reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, the negative side-effects have a smaller impact. So, forestation will be more effective as part of wider efforts to pursue sustainable development. Trees can help fight climate change, but relying on them alone won't be enough.
Future climate projections suggest that to keep warming below the Paris Agreement 2°C target, greenhouse gas emissions must reach net-zero by the mid-to-late 21st century, and become net negative thereafter. As some industries, such as aviation and shipping, will be exceedingly difficult to decarbonize fully, carbon removal will be needed.
Forestation is a widely proposed strategy for carbon removal. If deployed sustainably—by planting mixtures of native trees rather than monocultures, for instance—forestation can provide other benefits including protecting biodiversity, reducing soil erosion, and improving flood protection.
We considered an "extensive forestation" strategy which expands existing forests over the course of the 21st century in line with current proposals, adding trees where they are expected to thrive while avoiding croplands.
In our models, we paired this strategy with two future climate scenarios—a "minimal effort" scenario with average global warming exceeding 4°C, and a "Paris-compatible" scenario with extensive climate mitigation efforts. We could then compare the extensive forestation outcome to simulations with the same climate but where levels of forestation followed more expected trends: the minimal effort scenario sees forest cover drop as agriculture expands, and the Paris-compatible scenario features modest increases in global forest cover.
Up in the air
The Earth's energy balance depends on the energy coming in from the sun and the energy escaping back out to space. Increasing forest cover changes the Earth's overall energy balance. Generally, changes that decrease outgoing radiation cause warming. The greenhouse effect works this way, as outgoing radiation is trapped by gases in the atmosphere.
Forestation's ability to lower atmospheric CO2, and therefore increase the radiation escaping to space, has been well studied. However, the amount of carbon that could feasibly be removed remains a subject of debate.
Forestation generally reduces land surface reflectivity (albedo) as darker trees replace lighter grassland. Decreases in albedo levels oppose the beneficial reduction of atmospheric CO2, as less radiation escapes back to space. This is particularly important at higher latitudes, where trees cover land that would otherwise be covered with snow. Our scenario features forest expansion primarily in temperate and tropical regions.
Forests emit large quantities of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), with these emissions increasing with rising temperatures. VOCs react chemically in the atmosphere, affecting the concentrations of methane and ozone, which are also greenhouse gases. We find the enhanced VOC emissions from greater forest cover and temperatures increase levels of methane and, typically, ozone. This reduces the amount of radiation escaping to space, further opposing the removal of carbon.
However, the reaction products of VOCs can contribute to aerosols, which reflect incoming solar radiation and help form clouds. Increases in these aerosols with rising VOC emissions from greater forest cover result in more radiation escaping to space.
We find the net effect of changes to albedo, ozone, methane and aerosol is to reduce the amount of radiation escaping to space, cancelling out part of the benefit of reducing atmospheric CO2. In a future where climate mitigation is not a priority, up to 30% of the benefit is cancelled out, while in a Paris-compatible future, this drops to 15%.
Cooler solutions
Tackling climate change requires efforts from all sectors. While forestation will play a role, our work shows that its benefits may not be as great as previously thought. However, these negative side-effects aren't as impactful if we pursue other strategies, especially reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, alongside forestation.
This study hasn't considered local temperature changes from forestation as a result of evaporative cooling, or the impact of changes to atmospheric composition caused by changes in the frequencies and severities of wildfires. Further work in these areas will complement our research.
Nevertheless, our study suggests that forestation alone is unlikely to fix our warming planet. We need to rapidly reduce our emissions while enhancing the ability of the natural world to store carbon. It is important to stress-test climate mitigation strategies in detail, because so many complex systems are at play.
After a long battle, Paris's beloved bouquinistes will be staying put this summer. The decision, announced on 13 February by the French government, came after considerable public backlash to the police prefecture's original plan to move part of the iconic Seine booksellers elsewhere for the inauguration of the Olympics Games on 26 July.
Meanwhile, less than six months away from the event, Parisians continue to grumble over a lack of consultations with locals, warnings of gridlocked traffic, closed metro stations, extensive video surveillance and other grievances. So for host countries, what was the point of the Olympics, again?
In academia, the debate about the potential positive and negative effects of large-scale sporting events is ongoing. Although these events are often associated with substantial economic losses, the long-term benefits are the main argument in favor of hosting them. These include the development of material and soft infrastructure such as hotels, restaurants or parks. Big games can also help put the host region on the map as an attractive place for sports and cultural events, and inspire a better entrepreneurial climate.
The pros and the cons of big sporting events
The cost of these benefits, as the Parisians have realized, is steep. Host countries appear to suffer from increased tax burdens, low returns on public investments, high construction costs, and onerous running cost of facilities after the event. Communities can also be blighted by noise, pollution, and damage to the environment, while increased criminal activity and potential conflicts between locals and visitors can take a toll on their quality of life. As a result, in the recent past several major cities, including Rome and Hamburg, withdrew their bids to host the games.
A common feature of the economics of large-scale sporting events is that our expectations of them are more optimistic than what we make of them once they have taken place. Typically, expenditure tends to tip over the original budget, while the revenue-side indicators (such as the number of visitors) are rarely achieved.
When analyzing the effect of hosting large-scale sporting events on tourist visits, it is important to take into consideration both the positive and negative components of the overall effect. While positive effects may be associated with visitors, negative effects may arise when "regular" tourists refuse to visit the location due to the event.
This might be because of overloaded infrastructure, sharp increases in accommodation costs, and inconveniences associated with overcrowding or raucous or/and violent visitors. On top of that, reports of poverty or crime in the global media can actually undermine the location's attractiveness
When big sporting events crowd out regular tourists
In an article published in the Journal of Sports Economics with Igor Drapkin and Ilya Zverev, I assess the effects of hosting large-scale sporting events, such as Winter and Summer Olympics plus FIFA World Cups, on international tourist visits. We utilize a comprehensive dataset on flow of tourists covering the world's largest destination and origin countries between 1995 and 2019.
As a first step, we built an econometric model that effectively predicts the flow of tourists between any pair of countries in our data. Subsequently we compared the predicted tourist inflow in a hypothetical scenario where no large-scale sporting event would have taken place with the actual figures.
If the actual figures exceed the predicted ones, we consider the event to have a net positive impact. Otherwise, we consider that it had a "crowding out" effect on "regular" tourists. While conducting this analysis, we distinguished between short-term (i.e., focusing just on the year of the event) and mid-term (year of the event plus three subsequent years).
Our results show that the effects of large-scale sporting events vary a lot across host countries: The World Cup in Japan and South Korea 2002 and South Africa 2010 were associated with a distinct increase in tourist arrivals, whereas all other World Cups were either neutral or negative. Among the Summer Olympics, China in 2008 is the only case with a significant positive effect on tourist inflows.
The effects of the other four events (Australia 2000, Greece 2004, Great Britain 2012, and Brazil 2016) were found to be negative in the short- and medium-term. As for the Winter Olympics, the only positive case is Russia in 2014. The remaining five events had a negative impact except the one-year neutral effect for Japan 1998.
Following large-scale sporting events, host countries are therefore typically less visited by tourists. Out of the 18 hosting countries studied, 11 saw tourist numbers decline over four years, and three did not experience a significant change.
The case for cautious optimism
Our research indicates that the positive effect of hosting large-scale sporting events on tourist inflows is, at best, moderate. While many tourists are attracted by FIFA World Cups and Olympic games, the crowding-out effect of "regular" tourists is strong and often underestimated. This implies that tourists visiting for an event like the Olympics typically dissuade those who would have come for other reasons. Thus, efforts to attract new visitors should be accompanied by efforts to retain the already existing ones.
Large-scale sporting events should be considered as part of a long-term policy for promoting a territory to tourists rather than a standalone solution. Revealingly, our results indicate that it is easier to get a net increase in tourist inflows in countries that are less frequent destinations for tourists—for example, those in Asia or Africa.
By contrast, the United States and Europe, both of which are traditionally popular with tourists, have no single case of a net positive effect. Put differently, the large-scale sporting events in Asia and Africa helped promote their host countries as tourist destinations, making the case for the initial investment. In the US and Europe, however, those in the last few decades brought little return, at least in terms of tourist inflow.
