Cricket as growth engine? 

Eccentric though this may sound, economists have spent valuable time studying if sport can spur a country's economy.

Why, it seems even John Maynard Keynes devoted a chapter to the role of cricket in ending the Great Depression in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money , a book that shaped modern macroeconomics. In later editions, it is claimed, this chapter (No 25) was dropped.

For example, take the 1995 paper of Mr Howard J Wall, from Birbeck College, University of London (http:// >research.stlouisfed.org/econ/wall/cricket.pdf ) that compares cricket and baseball as engines of growth.

He looked at the per capita income of 95 non-communist, non-OPEC countries between 1960 and 1990 dividing them into three sets — cricket-playing countries, baseball-playing countries and those that did not play either sport.

Research finding

After studying the data, he came to the conclusion that countries that played neither cricket nor baseball grew 104 per cent in real terms over the period 1960-90.

Cricket playing caused the rate of growth of countries to be pushed 43 per cent lower.

However, baseball playing caused countries to have growth rates that were 80 per cent above what they would have been if the countries did not play baseball, and 123 per cent above cricket-playing countries!

Of course, one can now argue against this theory because the period Mr Wall has taken into consideration is between 1960 and 1990. India's growth story only began post-liberalisation, whenever one dates that from.

In 1981, India's per capita income was $977. In 1993, the per capita income was $1,399 and today it is $3,290.

In today's context, Mr Wall's argument may look pretty eccentric. But he is basing his theory on classical economist Marshall's suggestion that character building aspect of sport may play an integral role in harnessing the capacities of an economy.

Impact of sports

More recently, several economists have theorised on the impact of sports generally on a country's economy. But these theorists have not looked at abstract stuff such as character building aspect; rather they have analysed the macroeconomic impact of a major sporting event. Olympics and World Cup Football are the two favourites.

The paper entitled “The Growth Impact of Major Sporting Events” (http://www.eco.rug.nl/˜sterken/download/esmqfinal.pdf) written by Mr Elmer Sterken, University of Groningen, the Netherlands, uses a post-war growth model to look at per capita GDP growth rates.

He concludes that while hosting the Olympic Games has a positive impact on a country's economy, the same is not true of hosting the FIFA World Cup.

Bloggers' take

But while economists are trying to figure out the role of sports in economic growth,

Internet bloggers are going other way – trying to find out the loss of productivity by hosting, or even watching, a major sporting event, especially the Cricket World Cup.

Soon after India's early exit from the 2007 World Cup, there were posts pointing out the benefits to the nation.

One blogger (http://busyminds.blogspot.com/2007/03/benefit-analysis-of-indias-early-exit.html) argued that the Indian team's quick ouster would result in a productivity gain of 481 million man hours of work (Rs 817 crore of GDP) for the country.

The assumption is that if India had stayed the course, 3 per cent of the 81 million television viewers in the country would have wasted their time on watching 28 more matches.

This just seems to echo what Mr Willem Smit, a researcher at Institute for Management Development (IMD) in Lausanne, Switzerland, had to say about the World Cup football culture.

Mr Smit reckoned that if just half the workforce in competing nations knocked off work to cheer their sides, the cost to the global economy could be $10.4 billion in lost production time alone.

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