The spatial extents of casino catchments in Australia

Abstract

Casinos have proliferated throughout Australia and in many other parts of the world since the late twentieth century. An emerging body of research has started to explicitly consider the social and economic impacts of casinos in different settings. Many of the potential impacts of casinos are spatially patterned and relate to the connectivity of patrons and venues. In this paper, we use a predictive trade-area analysis technique, the Huff model, to estimate the spatial extent of casino catchments in Australia and compare these outputs to travel data from National Visitors Survey. Many casinos draw patrons from regional areas and from other states, a set of cross-jurisdictional patterns that pose regulatory challenges in terms of managing economic benefits and the distribution of harms arising from casino gambling. Avenues for logical extensions of the approach are discussed as well as alternative methods of sourcing data for validating predictive outputs.