Idealaus teorinio azartinių lošimų reglamentavimo modelio paieška Lietuvos Respublikoje ir užsienyje

Gambling is a rather recent phenomenon in Lithuania. Similarly to many other countries in the world, this controversial business field always receives considerable attention from the State government and the society. Although gambling business guarantees additional revenue to the state budget, it may become a source of social discord as gambling is always followed by a veil of negative outcomes, which results in controversial attitudes in the society towards the issue. Therefore, the field requires government control. In order to achieve effective control, receive benefit and avoid or reduce gambling-caused problems, a flawless legislative basis is needed as the foundation for the organization of gambling. The author of the paper emphasises the importance for every country that has legalized gambling to choose gambling regulation policies or strategy and establish proper legal basis as this should be the initial stage in setting every gambling regulation model. The analysis of the Lithuanian legislation brings the author to a conclusion that the proper policy should be determined by public interest arising from the fundamental law (or the constitution). However, Lithuanian gambling regulation model fails to meet this requirement. Regardless of the chosen direction, the combination of state (thus, of the society as well) and business interests (to the largest possible extent) and, most importantly, reducing the social cost of gambling to the maximum should be a goal that is always observed. To the author’s opinion, the way of achieving the goal should be making use of the existing experience of other countries and applying them respectively in Lithuania. It would allow learning from previous mistakes and creating an optimum gambling regulation model to meet the interests of Lithuania. Therefore, the paper focuses on the main, as the author sees them, structural elements of every gambling regulation model as a certain administrative and legal regime: licensing and permit system, taxation, monitoring (control) and protection of society. In order to identify the optimum gambling regulation model, models of the United States of America (states of Nevada and New Jersey), the United Kingdom, the Kingdom of Belgium, and the Russian Federation have been analysed in the above-mentioned aspects. The research includes the analysis of primary and secondary legal sources as well as works of foreign authors. The genesis of the development of the gambling regulation models of the mentioned countries is also reviewed. The analysis of the gambling regulation models of foreign countries is followed by a detailed legal analysis of the Lithuanian gambling regulation model presenting its advantages and disadvantages, differences from other countries and possible solution variants for the problems revealed. Finally, the author presents theoretical classification of gambling regulation models and identifies the main characteristics of an ideal gambling regulation model considering the whole of the analysis carried out, problems revealed and their possible solutions.