Euro 2024 Football Championship To Lift German GDP This Quarter

(Bloomberg) -- The monthlong European football championship that kicks off in Germany on Friday will boost the economy by 0.1% in the second quarter, according to the Ifo institute.

“However, the effect will only be short-lived, meaning that service exports due to tourists returning home after the end of the Euro 2024 are likely to fall again in the third quarter and, on balance, remain the same,” Ifo researcher Gerome Wolf said in a report. 

Major sports events typically “have a rather minor impact, with the exception of tourism,” Ifo said, drawing comparisons with the 2006 World Cup that also took place in Germany. While domestic consumers briefly boost hospitality and food outlays, they reduce other spending, so private consumption as a whole “will likely remain unaffected.” 

“At the beginning of the 2006 World Cup in Germany, arrivals and overnight stays by foreign guests rose respectively by 25%,” adds Wolf. “If we take that as a basis for the 2024 European Championship, we can expect more than an additional 600,000 foreign tourists and 1.5 million additional overnight stays,” he said. “That will probably be reflected in higher overnight rates and sales in the hospitality industry.” 

Major sporting events regularly distort economic output. Switzerland, which is the home to sporting bodies like FIFA, UEFA and the International Olympic Committee, now publishes gross domestic product numbers that excludes them. 

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