Abstract

Major urban regions in the Global South host Sport Mega-Events (SMEs) to stimulate sports tourism, yet studies of their sustainability have produced inconclusive findings. Most prior work treats economic, socioeconomic, and environmental dimensions separately, overlooking how these factors interact with each other. A Miyazawa environmental model combined with a spatial analysis is proposed to evaluate their impacts, decomposing effects between economic sectors, household income groups, and municipal levels. The model is applied to the Santiago Metropolitan Region in Chile, using expenditure of sports tourists who attended the Santiago 2023 Pan American Games. Findings indicates that sports tourism generated heterogeneous mixed economic effects by sector, household groups, and spatially within-municipalities. Moreover, these effects are also significantly affected by the different magnitudes of responsibility for environmental pollution emissions. These insights suggest that policymakers should tailor strategies to the specific profiles of different municipalities in order to ensure truly sustainable sports-tourism development in SMEs.