The Impact of Mega-Events in Emerging Economies: the World Cup in Brazil (2014) and Russia (2018)

Recently, there has been an increased interest on the part of developing countries in holding large-scale events, which finds a constant response from the organizers and support from development actors, which is expressed in a pronounced trend for approving applications from these countries as host countries. This trend is accompanied by another, which is retroactive in nature, the essence of which is the growth of critically negative assessments of the mega event model as a development model based on the assessment of the results of past events by the academic and expert communities. These estimates are mainly based on economic indicators in the short and long term and tend to differ significantly from those stated at the beginning of the selection process, as well as supplemented with negative effects that are not obvious for economic analysis. However, despite this, the decline in the first trend is not observed, but, on the contrary, it is stimulated by the policy of the organizers themselves and a decrease in interest from developed countries. In this regard, there are two questions that the author tries to answer in this study: why do countries with developing economies have a predisposition to controversial consequences according to the scientific community, and why, despite the limited effectiveness of a mega event as a factor of development, these countries continue to be interested in holding such an event? The author tries to answer these questions by comparing the World Cup in Brazil in 2016 and in Russia in 2018. Keywords: mega-events, FIFA, World Cup, emerging economies, Brazil, Russia