Income-Related Inequality in Gambling. Evidence from Italy.

In line with the global trend, in the last decades there has been an expansion of the gambling market in Italy, through a series of reforms that have considerably liberalised the gaming opportunities in both physical and virtual environments. This has led to a constant increase of the gambling volumes, for a collection of bets that exceeded EUR 95 billion in 2016. The proliferation of games has increased not only gambling revenues, but also the prevalence of problematic gamblers both among the young and the general population (Scalese et al. 2016).