Wimbledon Effect

The Wimbledon Effect is a chiefly British and Japanese analogy (which possibly originated in Japan, June 19, 2004, The GuardianAmory, Edward Heathcoat : , June 6, 1998, The Spectator) 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...
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