'To what extent is the gambling industry reliant on just a few heavy gamblers for its revenues?' Photo: jumpyjodes / flickr CC
The spoils of addiction
Compulsive gamblers are swelling the profits of the UK’s gambling industry. Economist Howard Reed discovered a disturbing truth in an unusual source of statistics
To what extent is the gambling industry reliant on just a few heavy gamblers for its revenues rather than collecting a more balanced set of revenues from a larger pool of people? Finding this out is not straightforward – leisure industry companies do not publish their annual reports in forms that make such information visible. So I went to the Living Costs and Food Survey (LCF – see box opposite) to find what proportion of households in the UK spend money on gambling activities and whether richer households are more likely to gamble than poorer ones. By this route I might arrive at a plausible explanation of where industry profits originate.
