Conducting any economic impact study on sports is usually very useful in evaluating the net change in an economy due to particular sporting activity, so I can understand the need for the Caribbean Premier League (CPL) to also conduct a study on the annual CPLT20.
If you missed it, the CPL has published aspects of its 2018 impact
study done by SMG Insight and indicated that the last tournament had a
US$127 million impact on the region.
It reached this conclusion based on “organiser spend, visitor spend,
and media value”. While the figures seem great at first glance, I have
several questions about what was published. I have no doubt that CPLT20
has pumped life into a dying sport in the region, but the organisers
probably should have produced more information for us to fully
understand this impact on our Caribbean nation-states. It would be great
to know the percentages for each territory, as well as Florida, and in
what areas.
The CPL report suggested media exposure of US$46 million but does not
explain in anyway how this value impacts society versus income
generation to the private entity; neither does it say what this ‘impact’
is from the exposure (more people coming to the Caribbean for sport
tourism, etc?).
Even more surprising for me is the visitor spend of just under US$24 million.
How much of this is on local versus imported goods? Where in the Caribbean are people spending due to the CPL? In fact, it would be great to ascertain the matrix used, and how the CPL determined that within that period, the spend is not residual from other activities that would normally occur, but so happened to be taking place around the venue. The report also indicated that the CPL employed 1,942 ‘local’ persons but did not indicate what that employment amounted to in dollar value or in what area. Maybe we could learn if the public purse benefits from this, or taxes, or are there tax write-offs?