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Positive Effects of Gambling
by Jerry "Jet"
Whittaker
July 9, 2006
A
full accounting of all costs must be done and it is not
easy. The economic impacts of legalized gambling are
tangible and experimental. The essential economic
impacts include the construction of a casino which leads
to many jobs for construction employees and suppliers,
employees to staff the casino, and the suppliers for an
ongoing casino. Multiplier effects then ripple
throughout the on the whole economy. But just because a
gambling project creates a lot of jobs and a large
capability is built doesn't mean the economic impacts
are positive. Non-economic impacts such as social costs
are generally intangible, difficult to measure, and on
balance negative.
More about the effects of gambling
Building a casino creates new jobs, such as a card
dealer, in the sense that they did not survive before.
But they might not be new jobs for the economy. Money
spent on a gambling competence is money that already
existed but was spent on other things. That is almost
certainly an obvious point, but one that needs to be
made. Building and running a
gambling facility
doesn't create wealth, it simply transfers it. The
advantage for a region is if the transfers are from
outside of the region. In contrast, there is not a
stimulus or net advantage if development of the casino
leads to more money being spent outside of the region.
Impacts of gambling in Australia
Australia is a good laboratory for formative the
socio-economic impacts. The country legalized a very
limited number of casinos, permit for a thoughtful look
at the impacts of new casinos. One notable and
predictable impact is that the casinos took more of the
gambling dollars, relative to other
gambling enterprises. For most of the casinos, the volume of
revenues came from locals. Some casinos have been
superior at targeting international visitors and most
have appeared to help tourism. But some casinos were
located in locations that were not big destination spots
before; hence they did not have a major impact. There
was a boom to local restaurants, but a significant
harmful shock on other trade. There were unsafe
effects
like congestion, noise, and traffic. Also, the transform
in the aesthetics was noted. For the small towns it did
show to slow out-migration. It was hard to ascertain the
impacts to the compulsive gambler. The finale was that
there was not a casino-led regional tourism boom.
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