In the COVID-19 Recession, Next Year's Lottery Issuance Hits 6.7 Trillion Won... Lotto at 5.5 Trillion Won, an All-Time High

Ministry of Economy and Finance Lottery Commission Approves Issuance Plan
Instant Lottery to Issue 600 Billion Won

[Sejong=Asia Economy Reporter Moon Chaeseok] Next year, Lotto will be issued at the largest scale ever. This is due to the increase in lottery sales caused by the economic shock from the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to the Ministry of Economy and Finance on the 19th, the Lottery Commission recently approved the 2022 lottery issuance plan containing this information. The amount of lottery issuance next year is set at 6.6515 trillion won, an increase of 7.1% from this year.

The largest portion of the lottery issuance amount is Lotto (online lottery), which is expected to increase by 7.3% from this year to 5.4567 trillion won. Both lottery and Lotto issuance amounts are the largest ever.

Next year's lottery sales amount is expected to increase by 7.6% from this year to 6.3903 trillion won. In the case of Lotto, it is expected that the entire planned issuance amount for next year will be sold. The estimated sales amount of instant lottery tickets is projected to increase by 17.5% to 521.1 billion won. After deducting sales business expenses and operating costs (3.7885 trillion won) from the expected lottery sales amount, the lottery fund creation amount is forecasted to be 2.6018 trillion won.

Lottery sales exceeded 4 trillion won in 2004, then turned to a decline for a while, but started to increase again from 2009 and surpassed 3 trillion won in 2011 with 3.0805 trillion won. After that, it surpassed 4 trillion won in 2017, six years later, and for the first time ever, exceeded 5 trillion won in 2020 when COVID-19 broke out.

At this Lottery Commission meeting, concerns were also raised about the large annual increase in the scale of lottery issuance.

The fact that other gambling industries such as horse racing were virtually closed due to COVID-19 also affected Lotto sales. A government official pointed out, "The scale of lottery issuance has expanded at a level significantly higher than the economic growth rate over the past five years." Among the sales of seven gambling industries including casinos, horse racing, cycle racing, motorboat racing, lottery, Sports Toto, and Sossaum (Korean bullfighting), the proportion of lottery sales rose from around 25% in previous years to 43% last year.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.