Country HDI Rank in the World SEA Games Gold Medals as of Dec 13, 2007 Singapore 25 38 Brunei Darussalam 30 1 Malaysia 63 45 Thailand 78 121 Philippines 90 34 Vietnam 105 59 Indonesia 107 38 Laos 130 4 Cambodia 131 2 Myanmar 132 1
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Suryopratomo 0, Indonesia's SEA Games Team 1
If Suryopratomo's logic is correct then countries with higher rank of HDI should get more gold medals than those with lower rank. Here is the fact.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Wow... it is an interesting fact.
I think the idea to investigate impacts or correlations of economic variables on medal in any games make sense and it isn't a new thing. Some people has discussed it, for example: http://www.slate.com/id/2105090/.
The idea is simple: a country having more resources has probability to gain more medals.
So, HDI is not enough to predict how many medal can a country get. If we want to make a simple regression, we may need to put some control variables, for example: GDP, population, a dummy variable for the host country, previous medal a country got in the last game, etc...
dendi
I found a relevant article from a refereed publication.
Daniel K. N. Johnson and Ayfer Ali.
A Tale of Two Seasons: Participation and Medal Counts at the Summer and Winter Olympic Game. Social Science Quarterly, Volume 85, Issue 4, Page 974-993, Dec 2004>
The paper is estimating medals winning success for summer and winter Olympic games between 1952-2000.
The model is medals=f(GDP, GDP square, Pop, Pop square, dummy for hosting country, dummy for the neighbor of hosting country, score for political system, the share of land area feeling a light frost, the share of land area feeling a heavy frost).
Hi Den, yes, it's a good idea to investigate the relationship (not just jumping up into misleading, silly conclusion like Suryopratomo did). Thanks for the cool reference. I'll read it later. But from what you wrote, it's very interesting that they put both GDP and GDP-squared and both population and population-squared. That is, they hypothesized that there is a GDP level above which your wealth is not contributing to gold medals anymore. Similarly, there is a level of population size above which your gold medals achievement is sinking. Now that's interesting.
Yes, I agree that the Suryo's article is terrible.
Sorry, the GDP should be read as GDP per capita, and score for political system should be read as dummies var. for political system.
Yes, the authors found there is an optimal level for the GDP/cap and pop. size.
Indonesia in term of pop. size may be above the optimum level, so the country is less manageable. This var. may be one of explanation.
Post a Comment