Incentive Regulation and Efficiency in Sport Organisational Training Activities

In all sports, organisational training forms a vital component of the activities of sport federations, associations and clubs in order to develop skills as well as to maintain and improve competitiveness. Government finances sport organisation training activities with the aims of improving sporting competitiveness, and enhancing quality of life and citizens’ wellbeing. The policy of subsidisation provides incentives for increasing productive efficiency, thereby allowing sport federations to share in the social gains from efficiency in the form of a greater proportion of winning performances. The issue considered in this paper is whether government subsidies have, in fact, resulted in an increase in the technical efficiency and allocative efficiency of those Portuguese sport federations which implement sport training programs. We find that the results are, at best, mixed, leading to a conclusion that the incentive regulation carried out by the training regulatory agency is not achieving its aims. Therefore, we propose a policy revision to enforce efficiency, based on a governance environment framework.