Ecological energy accounting for the gambling sector: A case study in Macao

Macao is a population-dense society that depends heavily on exogenous natural resources. In parallel with an expanding gambling sector, tourism became the most important driving force in Macao's economy. Economic growth in Macao has now benefited from the gambling boom and associated tourism for more than two decades. Although traditional economic theory has been used to deal with the economics of the gambling sector, the materials and energy foundation for this sector has not been previously analyzed. This is an important omission from the literature, since the gambling sector provides gamblers with food, tickets, services, water, electricity, equipment, labor, and other services that consume large quantities of materials and energy. In this paper, emergy synthesis is introduced to analyze Macao's gambling sector in 2004. Macao's casinos provide a dense flow of services that favor gambling tourists, since the emergy/$ ratio (1.42 × 1012 sej/$) for the sector is much lower than that for Macao as a whole (2.38 × 1012 sej/$). The emergy imports by this sector totaled 78.1 × 1020 sej, and its exports were 77.1 × 1020 sej. The emergy of services therefore plays an important role in Macao's gambling sector, and the transformity of an employee in this sector (11.2 × 1016 sej/person) was much higher than that of a typical person in Macao (5.27 × 1016 sej/person).