Assessing the economic impact of mega events using Computable General Equilibrium models: Promises and compromises

Mega events are perceived as an opportunity to foster regional development. In this context, CGE methods experience a growing popularity in the evaluation of mega event impacts with now close to 20 mega events analyzed with this method. Yet no critical and systematic review of such works is available to date. In this paper, we present such a review of existing works. We examine the main conceptual issues raised by these applications. Our analysis suggests an excessive reliance of practitioners on habits deeply rooted in the CGE community while more consideration of the specific features of mega events is necessary, if one wants CGE results to provide useful guidance to policy making in this area.