Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming November 2014 16 EVOLVING MACAU Macau ranks as the sixth-wealthiest territory in the world as measured by GDP per capita. The trouble is, the spoils of the gaming boom are not being shared evenly among its population. Could this lead to a Hong Kong-style social meltdown? others a lot, lot more. Macau’s median monthly salary stands at 13,000 patacas, or US$1,625. That means half of Macau’s workers earn less than $19,500 a year. You’d think mid-level workers in what’s pound for pound the world’s sixth-wealthiest territory would be taking home a lot more than that. In 2002, at the official end of Stanley Ho’s 40-year casino operating monopoly in the city, Macau’s GDP per capita stood at US$15,779, and the median salary was 4,765 patacas per month, or $7,148 per year. The transformational casino development over the past dozen years has come with a 170% rise in the median wage, though that’s hardly kept up with the almost 480% increase in GDP per capita over the same period. As happens all too often, the rich get richer while the poor are ignored—until, as we’ve seen in Hong Kong, they finally take to the streets. Pointedly, wage increases in Macau have fallen far short of soaring property prices. According to government statistics, in the second quarter of this year, the average price of residential units across Macau in the 50- to 99.9-square-meter size range was 104,913 patacas per square meter. The average price for the same size range in 2004 was 7,828 patacas. That represents a more than 13-fold jump. The government has built a limited stock of low-cost public housing, but demand far outstrips supply. Only a tiny minority of young Macau citizens were lucky enough to secure one of those units. Those who didn’t would be hard-pressed to come up with even the M acau’s nominal GDP per capita in 2013 of US$91,376 placed it sixth on the World Bank’s list of all countries and dependencies ranked by that measure of national wealth. Macau’s figure has skyrocketed over the past decade on soaring casino receipts. Several problems have emerged as a consequence, chief among them the uneven distribution of the windfall from those receipts—unfortunately, per capita, in economics parlance, doesn’t mean equally shared, so some earn a lot less and Poor Little Rich Place