Olympic Games, festivals, tourism… “Economic impact studies are the fossils of a bygone era”

2023-08-15 06:00:14

Measuring the economic impact of sporting events, festivals, major facilities or tourism has now become a ritual act.

At first analysis, this practice appears virtuous, in particular when it seems to guarantee the proper use of public funds. Without thinking too much about it, we are delighted that the economic impact of the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics is estimated between 5.3 and 10.7 billion euros by the Center for Sports Law and Economics (CDES). We also say to ourselves, another example, that it is fortunate that the Festival d’Avignon displays 50 million euros in economic benefits for the region.

In fact, there can be no question of minimizing the importance for a given area, whether national or local, of what can contribute to its prosperity. However, these studies pose a real democratic problem, since they are brandished as evidence adorned with the trappings of scientificity.

The case of the local economic impact of universities and colleges is symptomatic of this. The stated issue of dozens of publications in France since the end of the 1990s is to measure the contribution of higher education establishments to the wealth of their territory in terms of employment, production or added value.

But, despite their proliferation, these supposedly expert investigations, financed by these establishments or piloted by local authorities and their urban planning agencies, turn out to be extremely speculative at best when they are not misleading. Without going into technical considerations here, a few elements are sufficient to understand why (“Measuring the local economic impact of French higher education institutions: a critical analysis”Guillaume Quiquerez, Journal of regional & urban economy No. 3, June 2023).

Very disparate results

Most of them are focused on the effects in the economic circuit of expenses related to the operation of universities and colleges in the territory concerned.

Several questions then arise. First of all, practical: how to access good quality and exhaustive data? Secondly, methodologically: in the absence of regional public accounts allowing fine observation of the interdependence of sectors, what hypotheses should be combined to simulate the behavior of this local economy in the face of a given expenditure? Finally, epistemologically: is it really serious to imagine that a university could disappear overnight?

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