The driving mechanism of large-scale comprehensive sports events on regional public sports activity growth: evidence from China's provincial panel data

Based on the spatial difference-in-difference method, this study explores and analyzes the driving effect of large-scale comprehensive sports events on the growth of public sports activities in 31 provincial-level regions of China, from the perspectives of spatial aggregation, temporal trends, and regulatory mechanisms. The results indicate that during the 15-year period, the overall growth of public sports activities in various provinces demonstrated a spatial clustering trend (Moran's I = 0.21, p = 0.04), and the “high-high” clustering areas were highly correlated with the provinces hosting large-scale comprehensive events. Hosting large-scale comprehensive sports events can significantly increase the growth rate of regional public sports activities by approximately 26%, with a high growth period lasting for approximately 3 years, characterized by “large growth amplitude and short duration.” The spatial radiation range of large-scale comprehensive sports events is approximately 500 km, which has a significant driving effect on public sports activities within this distance. The competition achieves the growth of regional public sports services through three types of moderating factors: regional balance, policy environment, and factor growth. In a 15-year cycle, holding only one provincial-level large-scale comprehensive sports event yields the most significant driving effect on the growth of regional public sports activities, with a growth rate of approximately 10%. Adopting an interprovincial event hosting method of “two adjacent provinces” can generate more driving effects, with an average increase of approximately 9.2%. The hosting of large-scale comprehensive sports events should focus on building high-quality development policy concepts, optimizing regional sports resource balance, accelerating the transformation from a resource-driven to an innovation-driven one, and relying on the reasonable planning of event frequency and layout within and between provinces to achieve high-quality development of regional public sports services.