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This article adapts the concept of the moral economy and applies that adapted concept to UK gambling regulation during the early years (2020-21) of the COVID-19 pandemic. I extend the moral economy concept beyond the eighteenth-century English food riot, and beyond food staples. I also examine the role of law and regulation in the moral economy and highlight charity's importance to moral economy debates. I then consider gambling through a moral economy lens by exploring the pandemic-era regulation of horserace betting, lotteries, and bingo. I show that gambling in some forms (horserace betting and lotteries) was important to pandemic recovery projects and to spectacles of national coming together. Via lotteries, for example, the state sought to adjust customary expectations about the role of volunteers in providing essential services. Although regulators generally ignored bingo, there was a pandemic resurgence in self-organized games that is especially significant for work on the moral economy. I conclude by identifying some broader implications of this study, including on how essentiality is legally constructed, and on charity and volunteering within the moral economy.

The World Bank's International Finance Corporation has produced three research reports on gender equality and ride-hailing, in collaboration with ride-hailing companies. This article examines these reports in light of wider conversations about the growing corporate co-production of development knowledge. Focusing on research claims about the gender and development potential of 'sharing economy' firms like Uber, it argues that the shortage of women drivers has been successfully framed as a gender and development problem, rather than a labour supply problem to be resolved by ride-hailing companies themselves. Multi-stakeholder solutions are proposed, involving licensing actors, charities, government development agencies, banks, and insurance providers. Gender equality research contributes to a new development common sense involving expanding the numbers of indebted 'independent contractors' in the gig economy; reducing 'regulatory burdens' on platforms; and binding nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) ever tighter to corporate interests. This article shows the centrality of gender research to the Bank's broader reorientation towards business-led development, and highlights some distinctive lessons of work on ride-hailing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explains the broader stakes of contemporary British gambling reform debates, via an analysis of the White Paper High Stakes: Gambling Reform for the Digital Age (2023). I lay out the context to the White Paper, and I summarise its main proposals, focusing especially on efforts to reduce the harms caused by gambling. I also offer a critical analysis of one particularly significant and contentious proposed reform: mandated affordability checks for online gambling, when losses reach certain thresholds. I suggest that these checks reflect and deepen a shared regulatory, industry, and academic faith in online gambling technologies to resolve social responsibility problems, with wider implications for consumer surveillance and public health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gambling is central to our understanding of political economy, but the dominant story told about gambling within our subfield is highly partial. It focuses on globally spectacular forms and places of gambling, especially casinos. It tends to associate gambling with neo-liberal formulations of political economy. And it tends to fixate on men's play. In this article, I seek to show the value of an alternative lens on gambling and political economy, provided by the game of bingo. I hereby aim to improve our academic accounts of gambling, such that they take better account of everyday games, and of capitalism, such that they are better attuned to its heterogeneity and its regulatory interactions with other, more-than-capitalist economies. Relying on historical law and policy debates about bingo in the UK, I make two arguments. Firstly, I tell a new story about gambling and political economy, by excavating a crucial mutual aid dimension to gambling liberalisation debates in the 1950s and 60s, and showing how that dimension fared under Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government (1979–90). Secondly, I use bingo as an entry point to a different way of conceptualising political economy, where the state regulation of diverse economies is a central preoccupation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]