VietNamNet Bridge – A flight carrying the representative of a US-based group which runs many large casinos worldwide landed in Vietnam just days before Vietnam’s traditional Tet holiday. A closed negotiation was conducted in an effort to enter the domestic casino market.
Just days later, Decree No 03 on casino management [Nghị Địnn 3/2017/NĐ-CP], which allows Vietnamese to go to casinos, was issued.
Soon after the decree came out, Vietnam became a ‘hot spot’ for the US-based Las Vegas Sands, Singapore’s Banyan Tree, Australia’s Crown and Macao’s Chow Tai Fook and Sun City.
With the legal document, plus the decree on horse and dog races, and football betting, the doors to cash-prize games in Vietnam opened widely.
The move by the government is seen as a solution to stop the loss of revenue from casinos and games, estimated at $800 million. This is also expected to help stop the ‘bleeding’ of foreign currencies, estimated at $200 million a year, as Vietnamese bring foreign currencies when going abroad gambling.
The decree on casino will take effect in March, which means that investors have tens of days ahead to gear up to arrange enough capital to satisfy requirements to register casino projects.
| The move by the government is seen as a solution to stop the loss of revenue from casinos and games, estimated at $800 million. |
Though the decree sets limitations to restrict the number of Vietnamese going to casino, and though the decree will be valid for three years (in the immediate time, casinos will be open to Vietnamese for three years on a trial basis), analysts show their optimism about the development of the casino industry in Vietnam.
Some casinos in the region have shown their worry that they may lose customers into the hands of the casinos to be set up in Vietnam.
They have begun talking about the flow of gamblers from Macao, who have been put under strict control since late 2016, to Vietnam. They predicted that Chinese travelers would flock to Vietnam to gamble (there were more than two million Chinese travelers last year). Meanwhile, high-end gamblers are expected to visit to Phu Quoc this year.
The statement by the representative of Las Vegas Sands during a visit to Hanoi recently showed that Vietnam, together with Singapore, will be the two strategic points of the group.
Financial experts have expressed their support to the government to open domestic casinos to Vietnamese, saying that this would help increase the state’s budget revenue.
According to the Institute for Sustainable Development under the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, if the foreign investment in the casino industry increases by $3 billion, the GDP will increase by 0.58 percent.
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Kim Chi
CVD 
Các bạn không biết là casinos luôn luôn mang theo một số tội ác khác như mãi dâm, trộm cướp, nghiện ngập… hay sao? VN không có cách nào thông minh hơn để kiếm tiền sao mà phải cho mở sòng bài?
Xin đọc 2 bài báo dưới đây.
Studies: Casinos bring jobs, but also crime, bankruptcy, and even suicide
(Katherine Frey – The Washington Post)
While the presidential race is taking up much of the oxygen this cycle, many states have important ballot initiatives on the ballot next Tuesday as well.
Maryland is considering a proposal that would allow table games at the state’s five casinos, as well as approve the creation of a sixth in Prince George’s County, near DC. The proposal is touted as a way to fund education — for which the funds it generates will be earmarked — and, ironically, the opposition to it is mainly funded by owners of rival casinos. But economic research concerning casinos suggest that members of communities with casinos should be wary.
Melissa Kearney, an economist at the University of Maryland, released a literature review in 2005 summarizing work on gambling done to date. A study by Maryland’s William Evans and Julie Topoleski that focused on Indian casinos found that they created a significant number of jobs. The ratio of jobs available to adults increased, on average, by 5 percent. This in turn lead to a 2 percent decline in mortality, as residents’ economic conditions improved.
But the casinos also lead to a plethora of social ills, including increased substance abuse, mental illness and suicide, violent crime, auto theft and larceny, and bankruptcy. The latter three all increased by 10 percent in communities that allowed gambling.
Other work backs up the crime finding. The Baylor’s Earl Grinols, University of Georgia’s David Mustard, and the University of Illinois’ Cynthia Dilley found that 8 percent of crime in counties with casinos was attributable to their presence, a crime increase that cost residents, on average, $65 a year.
And the bankruptcy finding has been replicated as well. The St. Louis Fed’s Thomas Garrett and Mark Nichols found that Mississippi riverboat gambling increases bankruptcies not just in Mississippi, but in counties outside the state where many residents gamble in Mississippi. The effect was largest in neighboring states, with the Mississippi casinos responsible with a 0.24 percentage point increase in bankruptcy filings. Interestingly, other casinos — such as Las Vegas, Atlantic City, and so forth — didn’t have statistically significant effects on other areas’ bankruptcy rates.
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Unsurprisingly, legalized gambling also exacerbates problems with gambling addictions. The National Gambling Impact Study Commission found that having a casino within 50 miles doubles one’s likelihood to become a problem gambler. That suggests that the new DC-adjacent Maryland casino could create major addiction problems here in the District.
The evidence on casino gambling’s distributional impact is much weaker than that concerning state lotteries, but there is extensive evidence that the latter amounts to a regressive tax, given that lottery ticket purchasers are disproportionately poor. But some evidence — admittedly from industry groups — suggests that casino-goers are richer than the average American, so the story could be quite different than with lotteries.
But as with the liquor industry, much if not most of the gambling industry’s revenue come from addicts. Grinols estimates that 52 percent of revenue at the typical casino comes from problem gamblers, while an Ontario study put the figure at 35 percent and a Louisiana one at 42 percent. So even if gambling takes more money from the middle-class than the poor, it largely takes that money from middle-class people who aren’t exactly rationally willing to spend it.
Casinos aren’t even a particularly good source of tax revenue. Kearney notes that a number of studies have found that Indian casinos cannibalize business at nearby restaurants and bars, and in so doing actually reduce state tax revenue.
Like most ballot proposals, Maryland’s question 7 involves tradeoffs, and one could reasonably argue the benefits in terms of jobs created and education funded outweigh the costs in terms of crime, bankruptcy, and problem gambling. But those costs are real and, the evidence suggests, very large.
Do you want to increase crime, poverty, and addiction in your area? Build a casino.
Almost every economically depressed region in America is begging for a casino salvation. Casinos have opened in nearly ever major city in Ohio. Baltimore residents are celebrating new gambling jobs at the Horseshoe. Crime-ridden Springfield, Massachusetts, is approved for an MGM-led casino. Just across the border, four casinos are planned for the depressed areas of upstate New York.
These poor underemployed regions are being sold a scam. This racket portrays itself as a great deal: Local people get a load of new jobs, the state collects more tax revenue, and the area will boom as it brings in wealthy tourists from beyond the region. There are dreams of high-class gamblers coming in from around the globe, their C-notes trickling to the hotel staff and the dealers, all the way down to struggling local attractions and the new, locally owned coffee shops that will hopefully spring up in the casino’s shadow.
Maybe Bobby Flay or David Chang or some other famous chef will come. And eventually, if all goes right, country music stars and stand-up comedians will be lining up to perform at an entertainment venue and upscale mall. This is part of Phase Two, scheduled to kick off in 2024.
What really happens is this: Jobs are created, temporarily. Then the casinos and the statehouses prey upon the elderly and the poor. The table games, which justified hiring locals, are gradually replaced by slots, and maybe a sports bookie behind barred windows. Shambolic pensioners and working-class gambling addicts spend their days sitting at slot machines that are designed by geniuses who study the art and brain science of addiction. Complimentary bus rides are offered to transport more of the indebted and dependent to the cash gobbler.
The only noticeable pickups in business happen when welfare deposits are made. State-issued welfare debit cards are often usable at casinos and strip clubs, which is why the gambling trade calls the announcement of every new casino a “rake” on welfare payments. The casinos are a way of clawing back welfare revenue and a hidden way of making the state’s financing more regressive. It’s another lottery system, but with more middlemen.
Money doesn’t trickle down to local residents. It flows out from them in armored trucks to global gaming conglomerates, executives in Vegas, and to the state treasury. In the rarest of rare cases, a few members of an obscure Indian tribe will collect absurd $100,000 annual stipends. But even the inventive Pequot tribe can’t bus in enough Chinese immigrants to sustain that kind of return on Sic Bo and Pai Gow. So the stipend comes to an end, too.
People should have figured this out by now. How many six-figure high rollers are planning long, indulgent trips to Ledyard, Connecticut, or Tunica, Mississippi? Maybe they’re interested in tuberculosis for their holiday? Instead of upscale restaurants and coffee shops, new casinos in down-and-out areas are followed by check-chashing operations and the kind of Taco Bell that people call “wild.”
Prostitutes come, too. Local grocers start to move out as the crime rate increases. The real Phase Two is when the area becomes so broke, so sketchy, and so unattractive to anyone with money that the credit dries up and the casino closes.
The closure of four major casinos in Atlantic City this year should be a warning to everyone in Maryland, the Midwest, New York, and New England who wants in on this game. The success of Atlantic City in the 1920s was predicated on a legal and tourism situation that will never arise again. It was a place where gambling, drinking, prostitution, and sandy beaches could be easily found, right near New York City.
But once the city’s Prohibition premium went away, and flights to Miami Beach (and later Las Vegas) became cheap enough, the town was doomed. The nice restaurants and steakhouses at the Borgata are sustained by one-evening stop-ins of people renting beach houses at the considerably more tidy towns of Avalon, Cape May, and Sea Isle City.
Gambling towns that attract rich clients are sustained, in part, by the availability of some other vice that is banned or unavailable elsewhere. Although prostitution is prohibited in the city, Las Vegas exists near a zone where prostitution is legal. Macau also has legal prostitution and takes a libertine attitude toward narcotics, too. Despite Islamic prohibitions on gambling, drink, and child rape, Moroccan cities like Marrakech and Tangier find ways to provide them to Western decadents who go there “for the boys and the hashish,” as William S. Burroughs did.
If you want to increase poverty, increase the regressive nature of state government financing, increase crime and prostitution, increase gambling addiction and depression, and increase obesity, then go ahead and lobby your state government for a new casino. But if you want to compete for the high-end gambling dollar, that will require more illegal drugs and sex slavery than you can find in the Catskill Mountains or Springfield, Massachusetts.
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