THE spectacular performance of our athletes, at the recently concluded International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) World Championships in Beijing, China, cemented Jamaica’s position at the forefront of sports-loving nations and caused the collective chest of those of us lucky enough to be citizens of this blessed country to rise with pride. A recurring theme of this column, after each such exploit, has been to ask a vexed question: Beyond the hype and nine-day wonder of world attention, how does Jamaica benefit? The inconvenient truth is that there are very few, if any, tangible (ie, economic) benefits that come to Jamaica.

For Jamaicans, participation in world athletics events is reminiscent of going to Christmas-morning stage shows at the Carib theatre in my youthful days. Some would go to perform, others as spectators, and then there was the one who owned the theatre, collected the money at the gate, paid the performers, and made a handsome profit. In world athletics, we occupy the first two categories: performers and spectators. The Americans, Germans, English, Russians, Chinese, and others who build the stadia and host the games, as part of a coordinated sports industry, are the wealth creators. It is they who benefit economically from our exploits on the field of athletics.

The People’s Republic of China, in particular, is a country on a mission. At the present growth rate, the size of the economy is expected to overtake that of the United States by 2030. The signatories to the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, who made a commitment towards halving global poverty by 2015, have been saved embarrassment by China, which, by lifting close to half-billion of its citizens out of poverty, accounts for almost two-thirds of global gain. At the end of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, and again the IAAF 2015 World Championships, China would have succeeded in making a powerful geo-political statement and repositioned itself in the eyes of the world as a rising economic power; in the process shedding the old underdeveloped, poverty- stricken Third World image. It is easy to see that the Government of China has with purpose and deliberateness made an attractive return on the huge investments it made in staging these mammoth sporting events.

Look at America. Like China, the performance on the track at the 2015 World Championships was embarrassing when judged against tiny Jamaica. But look again. By some estimates, the global sports industry is approaching US$1 trillion. By being the major player in what has developed into an integrated global industry, the United States, based on earnings from four main revenue streams — gate receipts, media rights, sponsorships and merchandising — is laughing all the way to the bank. Add to the main revenue streams the other aspects such as public and private sector investment in sporting and training venues and facilities; manufacture of sports equipment, apparel, footwear and accessories; contribution in terms of earnings from employment and other economic activities that are hard to value because they are so diffused in the economy, and one begins to get the scope of not just a sector but an industry that is a significant revenue-generator for the American economy.

Some, by citing the millions of US dollars in “free” advertising that accrue to Brand Jamaica each time the national anthem is played to a packed stadium with billions watching by television, will seek to refute the charge that Jamaica does not benefit economically from our athletic prowess. After the performance of our athletes at the 2009 World Championships in Berlin, Germany, our Government announced the establishment of yet another committee to study ways of exploiting Brand Jamaica. Outside of recommending a campaign to promote Brand Jamaica to attract more visitors to the island, that committee went the way of the nine-day wonder of national hype and world attention.

The failure of the so-called Brand Jamaica committee to come up with anything meaningful can be forgiven given the almost universal ignorance about brand — what it is, its power, how it works and how to calculate its value. A survey of the minutes of board meetings of global corporations revealed very little time spent discussing this intangible asset or goodwill despite the fact that, for major brands such as General Electric (GE), brand value can be as much as two times capitalisation.

Simply put, brand is the image of a product, company or country. It is the value proposition people perceive when they hear a name. Brand provides the most compelling reason for consumers to spend money to buy a product, to visit a destination or to enjoy an experience. But if there are no products to sell, nothing with significant local value added on which to spend when people visit a destination or seek to enjoy an experience, having name recognition becomes meaningless. That is Jamaica’s dilemma.

Thanks to Usain Bolt, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, Bob Marley, Marcus Garvey, and our other icons, Brand Jamaica is up there in neon lights. A conservative estimate of Jamaica’s brand value is US$40-45 billion; more than twice the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), ie the total value of goods and services produced in the economy. Why the gap between the value of the brand and what we earn from it? The greatest part of the gap is attributable to us not having developed a sports industry, a music industry or any other industry, for that matter. It is industry — the productive capacity and wealth-producing enterprises of a nation — that produces growth in an economy, measured by GDP.

Finding answers to the question of what to do to increase the wealth of the nation to match the performance of our athletes on the track is not beyond us. There needs to be a proliferation of papers and ideas coming out of our growing number of colleges and universities, looking in particular at how we shift the emphasis from the macro-economic preoccupation with sectors (manufacturing sector, tourism sector, sports and entertainment sector) to establishing integrated industries (manufacturing industry, tourism industry, sports and entertainment industry) with Jamaica controlling more points along the value chain so there is a net benefit to the economy. Even more immediate, as we enter the political high season, we need to see the two main political parties make this the main topic of their respective political manifestoes. Hordes of people watching a big screen in Half-Way-Tree, jumping up and down and shouting each time a Jamaican wins a medal, is not an indicator of economic growth and development.