The Wimbledon Effect is a chiefly British and Japanese analogy (which possibly originated in Japan[1][2]) which compares the tennis fame of the Wimbledon Championships, held at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club in Wimbledon, London, with the economic success of the United Kingdom's financial services industries — especially those clustered in the City of London. The point of the analogy is that a national and international institution (the All England Club) can be highly successful despite the lack of strong native competition (in modern tennis Britain has produced very few Wimbledon champions).
London's financial industry has boomed since the deregulation of UK financial markets (the "Big Bang") in the 1980s under the Thatcher government — but has also become dominated by foreign companies, especially American investment banks, rather than British firms (a result opposite to the original intention of the reforms).
The analogy is typically used to mark a debate over whether it matters if an industry is primarily domestically owned if easing of foreign ownership restrictions allows the economy to benefit from foreign investment and increased global competition. The phrase can be used positively to assert the economic success of liberal attitudes towards foreign ownership (and sometimes to emphasize that such attitudes promote a level playing field for domestic and foreign interests alike); or it can be used negatively to emphasize how these policies have eroded a nation's ability to produce globally leading domestic companies. This opposing perspective is represented by economic patriotism and "national champion" policies.
The analogy has also been used in policy discourses outside Britain - most notably in the business discourse of Japan[3][4], whose financial markets and other parts of the economy (as of 2006) have not yet been substantially opened up to foreign competition compared with its international peers. It has also, for instance, been used in banking reform debates in South Korea[5] as well as in discussing Business Process Outsourcing in India.[6]
The term has been also frequently appeared in sports in Japan since late 20th. Including sumo where there has been no Japanese-born yokozuna since 1998 and no Japanese-born champion since 2006 as most of the top players have been from Mongolia or Polynesia. Modeling where nearly a half of the most skinny, most popular, most earning mainstream fashion models have been from the Eurasian continent specifically China since early 2000s, and martial arts (mixed martial arts and kickboxing) where it is hard to find a Japanese-born popular player or champion. The vast majority of the big names in kickboxing, specifically K-1, have been from the Netherlands or Thailand, and much like in the American-based Ultimate Fighting Championship, the vast majority of the big names in mixed martial arts have been from Brazil.
|
||||||||||||||