Gambling Expansion and Economic Growth

Abstract

Having reviewed the theoretical background to gambling and also the history and development of Macao’s casino industry, in the subsequent chapters attention will shift to addressing the socio-economic-political impact of gambling after the implementation of the liberalization policy in 2002. In the past, objective indicators were overwhelmingly used to illustrate socio-economic-political developments. However, in the last decades, both academics and policy-makers have come to believe that social progress instead of economic growth should be the ultimate policy concern; that information concerning the state of affairs and social needs plays a vital role in societal monitoring, social accounting, and social planning; that official information and statistics need to be checked and enriched by information from alternative sources; and that the complexity of a society needs to be understood through a systematic and longitudinal examination of the inter-relationships among social phenomena. Various types of subjective data have been gathered and have proven to be of use in the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of public policy, by identifying unintended policy impacts, measuring social costs, and discovering how these costs are distributed. Such research-based information also helps to enhance social consensus on the difficult trade-offs to be made under resource constraints and multiple demands, and assists policy-makers in establishing development priorities. Therefore, in order to obtain a comprehensive view of recent developments in gambling, both objective and subjective indicators will be cited for reference in the subsequent four chapters.