Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING APRIL 2018 36 COLUMNISTS and expand rapidly, but has also greatly benefited the gaming industry itself via infrastructure improvements, such as higher airlift capacity, better road systems and more solid economic fundamentals. For example, Asia now boasts a better educated and skilled workforce and higher spending powers within the region. Therefore, there exist a unique interdependence and mutual benefit between these two sectors. Countries along the Belt and Road have their own resource advantages with unique natural, cultural and ethnic elements. When these elements are offered together with gaming and leisure facilities, they will be able to compose a strongly exotic attraction factor that well caters to today’s Asian (and global) middle-class travelers, especially the outbound Chinese tourists. What is more important is the fact that growth in either sector leads to more growth in other sectors via additional jobs, incremental foreign investments, higher tax revenues, increased trade volumes of goods and so on, especially in those less developed countries along the Belt and the Road. As casinos and gaming are increasingly becoming legalized in more countries along the routes, it bodes well for expansion of the tourism sector and more gaming establishments in the future. The initiative has another priority on transport infrastructure construction and improvement projects, which we believe is going to benefit the gaming industry in the long term. Such improvements as massive ground transportation networks (including China’s signature high-speed railways), coordinated connectivity of customs clearance and comprehensive civil aviation cooperation and improvement are going to resolve, or at least alleviate at a minimum, many bottleneck issues for the existing and prospective casino resort properties Along the Road there are bustling market dynamics in Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam and Cambodia, with a high level of variety both in project type and in scope. Chinese President Xi Jinping first devised the concept of an economic belt along the historic Silk Road.