World Cup Qualification Influences Host Country Tourist Arrivals

This article highlights an aspect of mega-events that has been neglected: the changing composition of tourist arrivals during and after the event. The change happens because, in the FIFAWorld Cup, a quota of countries participate from each continent and this opens up new tourismmarkets.We show that the 2010 FIFAWorld Cup in South Africa had a smaller growth effect on South Africa’s traditional tourism markets but attracted a large increase fromnontraditional ones.However, the size of the effect,we find, is partly due to randomness: It dependsonmatch results in thequalificationphaseof the tournament.We use a new long-run data set of tourism flows to South Africa and a gravity model for tourism flows and runcounterfactual examplesof play-offmatchesduring thequalification phase to estimate howmuchmore SouthAfrica could have benefited had larger or richer countries qualified. We conclude that the random results of a few play-off games signif-icantly affect the extent to which the World Cup benefits the host country’s economy