The Olympic Games and the economic performance of the host city – the case of London 2012 against selected global cities

Abstract

The highly competitive global environment reinforces the trend to seek new investment opportunities that have various impacts on the local economy, and staging the Olympic Games is seen as one such example. The 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London have been widely discussed and investigated due to the very ambitious plans for socioeconomic and infrastructural development prompted by the Olympic legacy framework. Based on these observations, there are two main aims of this article. The first one is to evaluate London’s post-event legacy based on a literature review. The second research goal is to assess London’s economic performance compared with reference groups of global cities by using selected economic indicators. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were applied in this research, such as a critical literature review, a series of figures and tables with economic indicators and descriptive statistics. Based on the literature review and the author’s own elaborations, it can be concluded that the Olympic legacy framework and the Games themselves fostered economic and urban development, especially in East London. However, positive impacts and legacies were intermingled with several adverse effects. In turn, a comparative analysis of economic performance between London as the host city and reference groups of global cities demonstrates that, in the adopted time intervals, the dynamics of changes in applied economic indicators is relatively quite similar in groups of European, North American and Australian cities. In contrast, Asian cities, as one reference group, outperformed London and other global cities for the vast majority of the adopted time span.