世界杯给南非国家带来了什么?

South Africa has spent over four billion dollars on stadiums, airports, roads, and public transport. In just under three years, the cost of hosting the first football World Cup on African soil has more than doubled, while the jobs, tourism, and economic growth the tournament was supposed to bring with it now appeared to have been overstated. Udesh Pillay of the Human Science Research Council has been doing the World Cup sums for several years. In his recently published book, he argues that initial projections just didn't add up.

If you look at contribution to GDP through the event, it's going to be marginal, anywhere between 0.2 and 0.4 percent. Now that figure has been calibrated from about four percent four years ago.

Foreign visitor numbers have also been scaled down, from an expected half a million to 250,000 and less. And many of the jobs the tournament has created were temporary, doing little to dent unemployment figures. But the government insists World Cup related spending shielded the country from the effects of its first recession in 17 years.

Even as we're going through the recession, the only sector of our economy that showed positive growth was construction. And it was precisely because of what we have invested in this delivery of this infrastructure.

There's no question that the improved roads and airports will stand the country in good stead. Whether spending billions on a sports tournament was the best way to improve infrastructure is what's been debated. The decision to build new stadiums when old ones could have been renovated at a fraction of the cost has also come under fire. The stadium in Cape Town being a case in point.

FIFA wanted the stadium right next to the beach in the middle of the City Bowl in order to create that image and the spectacle associated with the World Cups. And because that's what FIFA is about. It's about the spectacle; it's about money; it's about profit generation. The legacy that it leaves behind in economic and social terms, FIFA has really no direct interest in that.

Not so, says the football governing body's Jerome Valcke.

It's not maybe a benefit people will feel, but I really think that the country has changed.

He argues that the World Cup has speeded up necessary improvements in South Africa.

The country is a different one even in terms of security. I mean the security people have obtained from the government more money than ever they could imagine without having the World Cup.

Finances aside, there is consensus on one soft intangible that bringing the World Cup to Africa may begin to change negative perceptions about the continent.

Nkepile Mabuse, cnn, Johannesburg.