Economic Impacts of Beijing Olympic
Bird Nest and Water Cube:
We can all recall the opening of Beijing Olympic in Bird Nest where the gorgeous fireworks and fantastic shows were shown. As well as the Water Cube, an exquisite designed water stadium, which all the water competitions were hosted. After the 2008 Beijing Olympic, those multibillions infrastructures were put into use only a few times and for most of the time, they were empty. Some people believe the construction of those infrastructures was a one-time deal and will never meet the return. Some people believe that there is a bigger picture in building the Bird Nest and Water Cube and the return for the Beijing Olympic is a lot more time what China put in for the 2008 Olympic
73.2% of the Beijing’s GDP was contributed from the service sector and the spoke person from the Bureau of Statistics addressed that hosting the Beijing Olympic game was a major leap from manufacturing country into a service provider and the Games’ effect would continue to benefit Beijing’s economy in the up coming years. In the end, the spoke person YU Xiuqin concluded “Beijing maintained considerably fast economic growth last year despite the impact of the global financial crisis and several natural disasters at home.” In this case, compare with pre Olympic game we can see the number has a dramatic change after the event and Beijing’s GDP did indeed growth by a large number. However, the major increase of growth rate only applies to Beijing, and 73.2% of GDP are from service sector is not a dramatic changes since Beijing is mainly a service city anyway. Spending, $41 billion to host the Beijing Olympic game at this point seems like only benefiting Beijing over all.
Negative Economic Impacts: Negative economic impacts are not easy to measure since there are a lot of direct and indirect causes for having negative impacts. However, we can derivate negative economic impacts from opportunity cost in hosting the Beijing Olympic game. According to Michael Wines, a New York Times writer who wrote on the article of “After Summer Olympics, Empty Shells in Beijing”, the Bird Nest and the Water Cube that were constructed to host the event are