Jamaica’s best for sporting value of its GDP

Submitted by nicolamira on 12 October, 2013 - 19:17
The Jamaica Olympic 100m relay

One of GSN’s objectives is to offer new insights into how sporting nations work. By reading our unique data together with other information, we gain a better understanding of the way sports performance is related to other national factors and characteristics.

One easy way to do this is to match GSN with international statistics. It’s what we do for example in the Per Capita ranking. We obtain a measure of every nation’s sporting propensity by calculating how many inhabitants are needed to score one GSN point. The fewer the number of inhabitants needed to score a point, the ‘sportier’ the nation is.

We have now matched Gross Domestic Product (GDP, the market value of all final goods and services produced by a nation) data with our Global Cup ranking in order to determine which nation achieves the greatest sporting success relative to its wealth. In other words, which country can squeeze the best results out of its national output, irrespective of how large or small it is.
 
The top ten table below refers to the year 2012. The USA were then the top nation overall, having won the Global Cup, while New Zealand was the sportiest in per capita terms. The GDP/GSN ranking offers a new insight and a fresh winner…
rank Country GDP/GSN ratio
1 Jamaica 25
2 Kenya 33
3 Ethiopia 55
4 Georgia 78
5 North Korea  79
6 Serbia 81
7 Cuba  92
8 Bulgaria 105
9 Belarus 121
10 Trinidad & Tob. 149
Jamaica has run away with the GDP/GSN title in 2012. The plucky Caribbean nation, also a brilliant second in the Per Capita Cup and 27th overall in the Global Cup in the same year (not bad for a country with a population of only 2,889,187 souls, the world’s 139th in this respect), had a GDP/GSN points ratio of 25. In other words, it needed 25 million USD to score a point, compared e.g. to the not insignificant sum of 2,2 billion USD the USA (only 54th in this ranking) needs to do the same!
 
A few notes on the figures:
- GDP: we used the nominal GDP figures published by the International       Monetary Fund. The source is Wikipedia
- GDP/GSN ratio: it’s expressed in million USD
- Only nations which qualified for the Per Capita Cup (i.e. with points scored in a minimum of 10 events in the year) are featured in the GDP/GSN ranking. For the record, the nation with the best (lowest) GDP/GSN ratio in 2012, irrespective of the number of events in which it scored points, was Samoa, with a GDP/GSN ratio of 5.
- Jamaica’s 2012 figures: GDP = USD mill. 14,837; overall Global Cup points = 590.
 
The full official GDP/GSN table for 2012 is below. 
rank Country GDP/GSN ratio
1 Jamaica 25
2 Kenya 33
3 Ethiopia 55
4 Georgia 78
5 North Korea  79
6 Serbia 81
7 Cuba  92
8 Bulgaria 105
9 Belarus 121
10 Trinidad & Tob. 149
11 Croatia 156
12 Lithuania 176
13 New Zealand 179
14 Slovenia 212
15 Hungary 220
16 Latvia 223
17 Czech Republic 224
18 Ukraine 231
19 Azerbaijan 266
20 Uzbekistan 279
21 Slovakia 349
22 Kazakhstan 472
23 Finland 479
24 Russia 487
25 Poland 526
26 South Africa 547
27 Sweden 554
28 South Korea 557
29 Netherlands 561
30 Romania 633
31 Portugal 646
32 Argentina 647
33 Switzerland 669
34 Spain 713
35 Great Britain 727
36 Austria 737
37 Australia 747
38 Denmark 781
39 Egypt 932
40 Norway 945
41 Italy 946
42 Brazil 1,005
43 Canada 1,006
44 Thailand 1,029
45 France 1,118
46 Ireland 1,155
47 Greece 1,195
48 Colombia 1,212
49 Belgium 1,241
50 Germany 1,245
51 Turkey 1,408
52 Mexico 1,494
53 Iran 1,725
54 United States 2,223
55 China 2,672
56 Japan 2,799
57 Taiwan 3,351
58 Malaysia 3,594
59 Venezuela 5,188
60 Chile 5,959
61 India 8,095
 
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