GDP and Olympic Participation

Thinking more about last night's post on China and the Olympics, I started wondering about the relationship between a country's population, the size of its economy, it's per capita GDP (or roughly how rich people in the country are) and it's participation in the Olympics. To that end, I ran the numbers this morning, using World Bank numbers from wikipedia (and using PPP for per capita GDP) and comparing the top 50 economies with Olympic participation.

It turns out that there's really very little correlation between a country's population or its overall GDP and its participation in the Olympics - particularly in the Winter Olympics. Some very small countries like Austria and Norway field really big teams, while other large countries like Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria and India field tiny teams or none at all. Same thing goes with economy size.

Where you start to see a relationship is, unsurprisingly, between per capita GDP, a rough measure of how rich a country is, and it's participation in the Olympics, as the charts below show:

In the summer olympics, you see a pretty close relationship between national wealth and participation, with a number of significant outliers. First, you've got a number of pretty small, very rich countries like Singapore, Norway, Switzerland, etc. that just aren't big enough to field big teams (although some of them send sizeable winter olympics squads). Then you've got most of the global powers (the US, Brazil, China, Russia, the UK) that send squads larger than their relative richness would suggest. Note here that China's participation (like Canada on the 2010 winter olympics chart below) is particularly heavy because it's the host. It will be interesting to see if India in coming years begins to act like the global power it's becoming by starting to send a disproportionately large squad to at least the Summer Games.

The Winter Olympics are somewhat different, in that they're much more the province of richer, more northern nations - with many of the poorer countries sending small or nonexistent teams, and some wealthy warm countries (like the UAE - which is unlabeled but is the dot near the 50 on GDP) also not participating. Once again, you see the global powers - the US, Germany, Russia and China overstocking their teams (along with host Canada) relative to their wealth. Again, nothing shocking here, but it will be interesting to see whether rising powers like Brazil and S. Korea begin to increase their Winter Olympic teams as part of a bid to become part of the international elite.