G3-247 Report LATVIA MARKET REPORT
Forced to think laterally
G3’s last market report on the Baltics was undertaken back in 2007. We return to the lands of forests and medieval castles and start our research with Latvia to see what’s changed in the gambling market.
Latvia is a well known budget party destination and a hot spot for weekend visitors. It is bordered by Estonia, Lithuania, Russia, Belarus and by a maritime border with Sweden. It has a population of over two million.
The country is divided into 118 administrative divisions of which 110 are municipalities and nine are cities. There are also four historical and cultural regions – Courland, Latgale, Vidzeme and Zemgale.
The Latvians and Baltic people are culturally related to the Lithuanians and despite foreign rule from the 13th to 20th centuries the Latvian nation maintained its identi- ty throughout the generations via its language and musical traditions.
Latvia and Estonia share a long common history and as a result of Soviet occupation both countries are home to a large number of ethnic Russians.
The Republic of Latvia was founded in 1918. In 1940 the country was however forced into the Soviet Union and then invaded and occupied by Nazi Germany in 1941. It was re-occupied by the Soviets in 1944 which then formed the Latvian region for the next 50 years.
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Around 120,000 to 300,000 Latvians took refuge by fleeing to Germany and Sweden. During the post war period Latvian was made to adopt Soviet farming meth- ods and rural areas were forced into collectivisation whilst a bilingual programme was initiated limiting the Latvian language. By 1959 some 400,000 people had arrived from other Soviet republics and the ethnic Latvian population had fallen by 62 per cent.
Later new industry was set up in Latvia using the coun- try’s well developed infrastructure and educated spe- cialists and major machinery factories, chemical and electro-technical factories were set up. Latvia ended up manufacturing trains, ships, minibuses, mopeds, tele- phones, radios, furniture, watches, tools, and diesel engines to name a few. More immigrants arrived to pro- vide a workforce and by 1990 the population peaked at 2.7 million.
A call for independence began in the late 1980s and The Singing Revolution began in 1987 and ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 when Latvia declared independence.
A majority of ethnic non Latvians did not receive
The Latvian gaming market is currently regulated by the Gambling and Lotteries Law of 2006. The draft bill, titled the same, was suggested as the current law does not cover all actualities of regulation of online gambling. The new law is now expected to make the points of law more precise in terms of gambling and will contain a definition of a card game tournament for example. In the future when setting up a tournament the organiser will have to draft the rules and get confirmation from the Lotteries and Gambling Supervisory Inspection (IAUI) that the rules are compatible with the new law. In addition the new law will also be able to block websites of those companies not registered in Latvia.
Latvian citizenship even though many were born in Latvia and today there are some 290,000 non citizens who live in Latvia.
The past decade has been fairly turbulent for the Latvian economy. Since the year 2000 the country has had one of the highest GDP growth rates in Europe however the
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