Gambling policy in European welfare regimes. A European research project on the profitability of gambling. Italian Report

The report has been written within the project “Gambling in European Welfare Regimes. A European Research Project on the Profitability of Gambling”, led by Pekka Sulkunen (University of Helsinki and CEACG) and funded by the Academy of Finland. The Italian study was conducted at Eclectica (Turin/Italy) and represents a case study among others carried out in Finland, Sweden, Norway, and France. The objectives of the whole research project were first, to evaluate the advantages and drawbacks of different ways of generating public revenue from gambling and re-directing it back to society; and second, to assess the consequences of public service provision by civil society organisations (CSO) and its financing outside the general state budget. The aim was to examine how different institutional arrangements to regulate gambling activity connect with different types of welfare regimes, how gambling policies are justified and how well their implementation correspond to the objectives. According to this framework, the specific aims of the Italian case study were: - to describe the main characteristics of the gambling regulation and taxation system; - to reconstruct the main steps of the legislative process which has led to the present regulation system; - to analyse the main justifications that the legislature has used to introduce new norms; - to explore the beneficiaries’ attitude towards the gambling industry. The report consists of three sub-studies, which corresponds to the three main chapters. The first is a reconstruction of the Italian legislative process that lead to the actual regulation system. The analysis also focuses on main justifications applied by the legislature to justify the progressive liberalisation of gambling. The second sub-study analyses the Italian gambling taxation system and its consequences – within a temporal perspective - on the public 7 revenues. In addition, it describes how some funds are distributed by the gambling concessionaires to associations and NGOs as SCR (social corporate responsibility) activities; it also describes beneficiaries’ position in this system. The third sub-study is a review of available Italian surveys on gambling and problem gambling. After explaining the nature and the limits of available data, the main reliable results are presented and commented.