Financing sport post-COVID-19: using Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) to help make a case for economic recovery through spending on sport and recreation

Abstract

This commentary aims to explore the challenges of financing sport in light of the economic and health questions posed by the COVID-19 outbreak. Governments will have to spend large sums of public money to stimulate recovery; therefore, it is asked: how should sport and recreation spending be part of recovery plans? The case of the Montreal Olympics debt and deficit disaster is re-examined. It is argued that if the federal government (a currency issuer) underwrote the games many of the issues that followed may have been avoided. Therefore, this commentary challenges sport and leisure scholars to think about how sport and recreation could be part of the solution when fiscal policy is becoming the preferred antidote to the social and economic consequences of the Coronavirus pandemic.

Modeling the Driving Factors of the Value Added in the Chinese Sports Industry: A Ridge Regression

“…Under the governmental guidance, China's sports industry is through a period of rapid development, and there are defined task indicators for the years 2025 and 2035: By 2025, the overall size of the sports industry will approach 5 trillion yuan (CNY) [24]; by 2035, the sports industry will have become a pillar of the Chinese economy [6]. The impact of the COVID-19 has hampered the global sports industry [25], and China's sports industry is currently at a critical juncture for achieving multiple national objectives. Therefore, this study systematically analyzed the factors influencing the growth of sports industry between 2010 and 2019.…”

Theorising organisational resilience for sport management research and practice

“…Sport organisations face many challenges because of different stakeholder interests, performance-related funding regimes and the complexity of the macro-environmental context (De Bosscher et al, 2019;Feddersen et al, 2020;Green, 2007;Kasale et al, 2018;Pedras et al, 2020). The Covid-19 pandemic presents new threats for sport management at both elite and grassroots levels (Parnell et al, 2020), as well as possible opportunities (Hammond, 2020). In this context, the concept of organisational resilience, for which a standard definition is "the ability of an organisation to anticipate, prepare for, respond and adapt to incremental change and sudden disruptions in order to survive and prosper" (Denyer, 2017, p. 5), 1 becomes very relevant to National Governing Bodies of Sport (NGBs) and wider networks of sports organisations (Warner, 2020).…”