Half of National Lottery in Spain sold at Christmas

(Press-News.org) Contact information: ana herrera
oic@uc3m.es
Carlos III University of Madrid
Half of National Lottery in Spain sold at Christmas

Sales of the National Lottery have fallen for the last five years, which shows that even the most traditional games have been affected by the economic crisis. In 2012, it collected 5.0163 billion euros, down 4.8% from 2011 and 12.2% compared to 2007. The preliminary data from the report on 2013 suggests that this decline is increasing, when this underlying trend is added to the impact on buyers of the 20% tax that was placed on lottery prizes bigger than 2,500 euros at the beginning of the year. "Such a prolonged decline is exceptional in the history of Spain's national lottery," conclude the authors of the yearbook, which was published in collaboration with the UC3M Institute of Policy and Governance (IPOLGOB).

José Ignacio Cases, Professor Emeritus at the UC3M, member of the Institute and Vice President of the CODERE Foundation, said at the presentation, "The IPOLGOB studies have emphasized—contrary to popular belief, which rests on no scientific grounds—that the economic crisis Spain is enduring has produced a considerable reduction in the amount of money wagered by the Spanish. The idea that in times of crisis one resort s to chance to seek salvation from our evils couldn't be more false. We are not a coarse country nor does our hope lie in a stroke of luck. The data show that the reduction of spending on entertainment is clear and evident."

Fewer décimos (one-tenth of a share of a lottery ticket), according to the province

The Gaming Yearbook in Spain provides more data about the National Lottery. Spending per capita has fallen from 126.40€ in 2007 to 106.29€ at present. Said another way, instead of buying six décimos every year, people buy five. The trend of declining sales is active in all provinces. The apparent spending per capita is very high in Soria, Segovia, Burgos, Lérida, Palencia, Huesca and Vizcaya (all of them over 150€ per capita per year). On the other hand, it is very low in Melilla, Ceuta, Huelva, Cádiz, Badajoz, Sevilla, Las Palmas, Orense and the Balearic Islands, less than 70 € per capita per year. "It is, as everyone knows, a very special drawing which society in general is involved in, with individual purchases, pools with family and friends, purchases in large volumes by associations and clubs of different types," explains José Antonio Gómez Yañez, Professor of Sociology at the UC3M and Director of the Yearbook.

The Gaming Yearbook in Spain attempts to collect, in one publication, data related to gaming from an economic perspective, as one aspect of this broad and growing entertainment industry. "The public perception of gaming is dominated by prejudices: literature and film have indelibly associated it with the shadier elements of society, proof that it arouses emotions," comments Professor Gómez Yañez. "In the academic world, it does not attract the attention of a lot of researchers because, in general, one tends to consider it a superficial activity, unimportant in the whole of human activities. These prejudices hide the economic and social dimensions of gaming as an industry. An activity that moves around 3% of the GDP, which has enabled several Spanish companies to become powerful multinationals, and that employs almost 80,000 people cannot be irrelevant," he notes.



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