Introduction

In the first decade of the new millennium, several affluent economies have already experienced 20 years of unprecedented rises in gambling consumption. Details in specific countries are not easily obtained and there are large variations in how national consumption data are reported. For example, some calculate net expenditure on gambling differently by excluding reasonable operational costs, but others are affected by inflated estimates of what it takes to deliver the product.1 Despite these variations, gross estimates give some idea of the scale of current annual consumption. At the upper end, the Canadian theorist, John Ralston Saul (2005) estimated that worldwide expenditures on gambling total around $900 billion per year.2