Beijing’s bet on the lottery – a state-run exception to China’s ban on gambling – appears to be paying off handsomely with the recently concluded World Cup driving sports lottery ticket sales up 83 per cent year-on-year last month.
China alighted on the lottery as a means to boost revenues and supplement woefully underfunded social spending in the 1980s, creating an exception to a ban on gambling that has been strictly enforced since the days of Mao Zedong.
Including the sports lottery introduced in 2009, it generated more than $48bn in sales last year, ranking behind only the US, whose state lotteries pulled in more than $68bn in 2012, according to the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries
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