Impacts of Lottery Selling on Retailer’s Income & Employment－Taking Taipei City for Example

There are two major objectives for the issuance of Public Welfare Lottery. One is to improve social welfare, and the other is to promote the employment of vulnerable groups. In order to reach the second target, the Public Welfare Lottery Issue Act regulated that the lottery retailer license shall be reserved for the mentally or physically handicapped, aborigines, and the single parent family with low income. However, the lottery retailer has to be capable to afford market risks, and owns human and financial capital to maintain their business, especially for the computer-lottery retailers (type B) who have to meet a higher financial requirement. Thus, this study tries to describe the personal attribute of those retailers who are able to survive, and to compare the differences between scratch-lottery retailer (type A) and computer lottery retailers (type B). In addition, the characteristic of scratch-lottery and computer-lottery products are quiet similar, we assumed that there are crowded-out effect between two types of lotteries, and cause the competition of two types of retailers. In this study, we try to find out the influence of crowded-out effect.
The study takes the lottery retailers in Taipei city as research objects, and investigates their characteristics and the condition of their business operations by questionnaire. We collected 121 samples, and adopted descriptive statistics and regression method to analyze them. In conclusion, most of the lottery retailers are in their middle age, and have low educational background. When it concerns about the differences between the two types of lottery retailers, we find that computer lottery retailers (type B) are obviously superior to type A retailers in human capital, moreover, there are more type A retailers who were unemployment or non-labor force when compared to type B retailers. As for the crowded-out effects, the study has no empirical evidence to demonstrate its existence, but the retailers who consider to be influenced by crowded effect have less improvement on income and work satisfaction. Therefore, we would like to suggest the authorities to decrease the market risks and capital barrier when offering preserved work opportunity to the vulnerable groups, so as to allow the most disadvantaged to benefit from such a social welfare measure.