Between fiscal returns and social harm: reframing gambling regulation in Kazakhstan through international evidence
Khamzina Z. Buribayev Y.
2026Frontiers Media SA
Frontiers in Sociology
2026#10
Background Since 2007, Kazakhstan has gradually modernized gambling regulation and in 2023–2024 enacted major reforms, including the creation of a specialized regulator, tighter advertising rules, expanded exclusion regimes, and stronger criminal enforcement. Objective: To assess how this evolving regulatory model aligns with international practice and to derive evidence-informed policy options, treating gambling law as a sociolegal regime for allocating gambling-related risks and fiscal rents. Methods: We use an exploratory sociolegal mixed-methods design that combines doctrinal and comparative legal analysis with a descriptive synthesis of 2019–2024 official statistics on market size, taxation, enforcement, and harm-reduction proxies. Results Kazakhstan’s legal gambling market expanded further in 2024, recorded criminal cases for illegal gambling declined, and coverage of debtor-based and voluntary self-exclusion instruments increased sharply, while a large offshore online segment persisted. Situating these trends within a comparative coding of the United Kingdom, Spain, and Italy, we show that Kazakhstan combines strict advertising controls, extensive exclusion tools, and advanced enforcement technologies with a comparatively heavy and complex tax mix and a regulator located within a line ministry. Conclusion A public-health-oriented configuration of instruments appears normatively most consistent with the dual goals of channeling demand into the legal market and mitigating gambling-related harm, but the available data remain descriptive and the post-reform observation window is short. We discuss incremental policy options regarding taxation, regulator autonomy, harm reduction, and cross-border enforcement. Copyright
comparative public policy , gambling regulation , harm-reduction measures , regulatory instruments , social costs of gambling
Text of the article Перейти на текст статьи
Department of Law, Zhetysu University named after I. Zhansugurov, TaldyKorgan, Kazakhstan
Department of Law
10 лет помогаем публиковать статьи Международный издатель
Книга Публикация научной статьи Волощук 2026 Book Publication of a scientific article 2026