Last January 28, the report “Policies to prevent and combat pathological gambling in Piedmont. The evolution of the phenomenon, the implementation of Regional Law no. 9/2016 and the activities of the plan” of the Piedmont Region.
The project was born in 2016, when the region passed a law to combat pathological gamb ling (r.l. No. 9/2016). The purpose of the law is to protect the weakest and most vulnerable segments of the population.
Article 5 of the law prohibits the placement of devices within a certain distance (500 meters in larger municipalities, 300 in smaller ones) from places considered sensitive, such as schools, banks and residential facilities for the elderly. This is the so-called “distance meter.” The application of this rule is differentiated over time. It has been implemented for commercial establishments since November 2017.
“After 2016, there is a sharp decrease in physical gaming volumes in Piedmont,” the report says , “compared to an increase in other Italian regions. Compared to the figure for 2016, the year when the Piedmont Law came into effect, the decrease recorded in Piedmont in 2019 is 572 million euros (-11%), while in the rest of the nation the reduction began only in 2019, -18 million euros (-0.03%).” Also sharp was the drop in losses-the difference between amounts played and won-at 16.5 percent, “more substantial than in the rest of Italy (-0.9 percent).”
Unfortunately, the phenomenon is still present, but data confirm that more restrictive measures, including hourly restrictions, bring better results. In fact, “studies conducted in Piedmont by theInstitute of Clinical Physiology-National Research Council (IFC-CNR)1 have shown that in municipalities with more restrictive measures, gaming volumes were reduced in greater proportion than in municipalities with more permissive measures. This is about 93 euros less per inhabitant than would have been observed in the absence of the hourly limitation. Where the measures are less restrictive (allowing more than 10 hours per day of operation) there is no statistically significant difference in gaming volumes.”
