How Much Will this Event Benefit Our Economy? A Checklist for Economic Impact Assessments with Application to Milan 2015 Expo

Policy makers, policy advisers and the general public frequently perceive events as beneficial to the economy of the host city. Such belief is supported by numerous Economic Impact studies, often based on Input-Output models, which usually exhibit large positive impacts. However, research has identified potential issues in Economic Impact studies that may result in misguiding policy recommendations. Yet, no systematic presentation of such potential flaws is available to the researcher and the practitioners. To fill in this gap, this article proposes a set of criteria based on 7 categories and 32 criteria and applies them to the latest mega events held in Italy. This application supports the value of our proposed criteria and suggests that the claims based on existing studies are debatle.