Over the next two weeks, the Olympic “medal table”, ranking nations according to the number of gold, silver and bronze medals their athletes have collected in London will be widely reported.

But there will be few surprises: The United States, China and Russia will almost certainly top the table, followed by the smaller wealthy countries. Great Britain will most likely fare better than usual, because the host nation usually does.

Population, GDP per capita, past performance and “home advantage” appear to have a strong relationship to nations’ Olympic success, a common-sense observation that has long been demonstrated by social science.

Substantial academic literature, stretching back to the 1950s, has been produced by economists, sociologists and political scientists using statistical techniques to relate nations’ macroeconomic conditions to their Olympic performance, and forecasting upcoming games.

Typically, these take the form of regression analyses that use historical macroeconomic data as independent variables to account for participating countries’ medal share at the Olympics.

During the London games, the FT will use three four such models as a benchmark to rank our medal table according to teams’ ability to outperform models that account for their size, wealth and other socioeconomic factors:

• Emily Williams, a PhD candidate at London Business School updated a model first developed by  Andrew Bernard of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth for the 2000 games in Sydney. It focuses on population, income per capita, total GDP, and host-nation advantage to explain Olympic performace.
• Daniel Johnson, an economist at Colorado College has used a similar model to publish predictions for Olympics for several years. A change to his approach for the 2012 adds a host-nation effect that pre-dates and post-dates the current games, so China and Brazil should benefit in addition to Great Britain), and eliminates an earlier focus on political structures and climate.
• José Ursúa and Kamakshya Trivedi of Goldman Sachs, who, as part of a recently-published note on the economics of the Olympics, highlighted the strength of the host-nation advantage in certain sports and used the bank’s “Growth Environment Score”, a proprietary summary statistic used to score countries’ institutional structures, as a key independent variable.
• (Update 27/7): PWC’s briefing paper Modelling Olympic Performance, which found population, average income levels (measured by GDP per capita at PPP exchange rates), ex-Soviet status and host-nation effect to be statistically-significant factors.

Because each of the models excludes some countries, the table below also shows a “consensus” view formed from the average of the available 2012 predictions for each country, along with the actual medal tally from the Beijing games in 2008. Figures are rounded to whole numbers, but the calculations underlying the graphic are more precise.

As the games progress, the FT medal table will be updated continuously to track each team’s performance against these benchmarks.

Interactive graphic by Martin Stabe, Steve Bernard, Peter Feeney, and Cleve Jones