From Science Daily
It is often said that more gambling (including playing the lottery) takes place during economic crises, but a study carried out by researchers at Universidad Carlos III of Madrid (UC3M) indicates that the opposite is true: in the last year, people have decreased the frequency of gambling activities, the number of gambling activities participated in and the amount of money gambled.
The gambling industry has not escaped the changes in people’s habits and behavior that the crisis has produced. This is one of the conclusions that can be drawn from the latest report on Spaniards’ perception of games of chance, carried out by UC3M’s Instituto de Política y Gobernanza (IPOLGOB — Institute for Politics and Governance) in collaboration with the Codere Foundation and the Centro de Estudios de Políticas y Legislación del Juego (Center for Gambling Policy and Legislation Studies). “The novelty in 2012 was that the frequency with which people gambled as well as the number of games and quantity of money they gambled decreased,” the report reveals. “The amount gambled is controlled in all households, including the wealthier ones, and this situation especially affects the lower-middle classes and immigrants,” comments one of the authors of the study, José Antonio Gómez Yañez, a professor in UC3M’s Political Science and Sociology Department.
The proportion spent on gambling as a part of the leisure expenditures has decreased from 9.4 to 7.7 percent. In fact, when there are economic problems in a household, spending on gambling nearly disappears, with only small amounts still being spent on certain types of public games of chance. “When there is an economic crisis, what goes up is the demand for luck, particularly those types of gambling that carry with them ‘hope’, the idea that a stroke of luck that costs very little money may bring relief or even take care of the rest of their life,” points out professor Gómez Yañez. “Spaniards’ relationship with gambling is very rational and cold,” he adds, “as nearly the entire population of Spain (over 85%) gambles in some form, but they do so in a very objective way that is dominated by social customs.
