Authors
Caruso, R.
Date
2011
Keywords
Sport participation; crime reduction; cognitive
development.
Country of research
Italy
Summary of findings
This paper is in two parts. The first part
proposes what the author regards as a novel economic definition of
sport of sport participation. Following an extended
exposition of the work of a number of theorists who regard sport as
a form of consumption and production, the author defines sport as:
‘a joint indivisible good, which is produced and consumed by
different agents at a certain place and time. It can have
multiple shapes. In fact, it is a combination of (i) a market
good, (ii) a relational good and (iii) an expression of threat,
power and coercion. All components differ in intensity, but
differently from (i) and (iii) the relational component must
necessarily be positive’. This is used to produce an
hypothesis: sport may be beneficial for society as long as the
relational component dominates both the coercive and exchange
components. The author relates this possible function of
sport participation to literature in happiness studies and life
satisfaction and quotes research which indicates a positive
relationship between sport participation and self-reported
happiness and well-being, especially among females. The
author also uses data from the USA which indicate that athletes
tend to have higher employed-based monetary and non-monetary
benefits.
The second part of the paper uses panel data
from Italian regions to analyse the impact of sport participation
on the rate of (i) property crimes; (ii) violent crime and (iii)
juvenile crime. The author uses published data from the Italian
National Statistical Office (1997-2003) and also included data on
unemployment (as a proxy for general economic conditions),
education and current public spending on security (proxy for
deterrence). The results of the analysis were as follows:
(i) There was a robust negative association
between sport participation and property crime. An increase
of 1% in sport participation reduced property crime by 0.3%
approximately.
(ii) There is a robust negative association
between sport participation and juvenile crime. A 1% increase
in sport participation reduces juvenile crime by 0.8%
approximately.
(iii) There is a positive association between
sport participation and violent crime. However, it is only
weakly significant and the author speculates that this might be
related to football hooliganism and the fact that sport might
provide the social occasions for such activity.
Further, using levels of literacy as a
variable the author found a complementary relationship between
sport, literacy and lower property and juvenile crime. The
author speculates that investment in education (cognitive
abilities) and sport participation (non-cognitive abilities)
reinforce each other.
The author concluded that the data prove that a relational
activity such as sports participation has a measureable impact on
societal environment and can also have an impact on economic policy
prescriptions - investment in sport can have broader socially
beneficial outcomes. However, the author concludes that to say that
sport participation is not detrimental to society is not equivalent
to saying that sport participation is always beneficial.
Further evidence is required regarding the issue of violent crime,
larger panels are needed and disaggregated data for several types
of sports are required.
Methodology
Secondary data analysis
Source of reference
The Journal of Socio-Economics, 40, 455–
463
Web reference
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053535710001265