Comment on “ A sian Participation and Performance at the O lympic G ames”

Noland and Stahler (2016) shed light on Asian participation and performances at the Olympic Games. This paper presents a wide range of fact findings regarding Asian Olympic performances, including the performances of three outstanding Northeast Asian countries, China, Japan and Korea; the better performances of Asian women than men; and the better performances in weight-stratified contests, such as wrestling, judo, taekwondo, and weightlifting, and in size-free games, such as table tennis, shooting, badminton, archery, and gymnastics. I broadly agree with what Noland and Stahler discover and their forecasts for the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games. As is often argued with positive economics, the proof of a good theory depends on its forecasting (predictive) power. We need to wait to see whether Noland and Stahler’s approach will still be justifiable after the 2016 Olympics. At this stage, we can say that medal forecasting would be quite accurate for three major countries ‐ China, Japan, and Korea ‐ while those for the rest of Asian countries would contain substantial errors. I will give some reasons in the following. I have two broad questions concerning with this paper at this moment. First, Noland and Stahler rely on Bernard and Busse (2004), Johnson and Ali (2004), and Otamendi and Doncel (2014) for their theoretical framework and econometric estimation methods. Their empirical approach is used extensively in this research field. These authors use the production function approach to the Olympic caliber athletes by assuming that (i) the expected medal share accruing to a country should be equal to its share of the total population of countries participating in the Olympics, and that (ii) the production function for generating Olympic caliber athletes for a country i in year t requires people, money, and some organizational ability. In other words, the authors assume that talent is distributed equally across countries, and the production technology is basically the same across countries except for constant terms (including dummies for regions, the host country, and the communist block dummy). As the actual Olympic records show, many individual sports require physiological advantages, so that competition itself may not be fair from the Asian point of view. This reflects the fact that talent is not distributed equally across countries. Production technology of caliber athletes is also quite different among countries due to various sociocultural differences. In addition, as we know from the industrial organization literature, market share competition depends on the