​Sales of lottery tickets in China rose to their highest level in a decade in April, data released on Wednesday showed, with economists indicating that young people in particular are keen to try their luck amid economic uncertainty caused by the pandemic, Reuters and Agerpres reported. .

The world’s second-largest economy is recovering from three years of restrictions imposed by COVID-19, growing 4.5% in the first quarter, but April statistics show the economy is slowing, with youth unemployment at a record 20.4%.

Against this background, sales of national lottery tickets in April rose 62% year-on-year to 50.33 billion yuan ($7.28 billion), the highest April in a decade, while the first four months saw overall growth up 49.3% to 175.15 billion yuan, according to data from the Ministry of Finance in Beijing.

“A salary of a million is not as good as winning a million,” says Freddie Xiao, a 28-year-old marketing specialist at an Internet company, as she buys lottery tickets at a mall in Beijing.

The young woman says she is also motivated by fears that she might lose her job. Some economists believe there is a correlation between economic uncertainty and the sale of lottery tickets.

Economists blame the situation, among other things, on the high level of unemployment

“People, especially young people, hope to get rich overnight. It is also related to the economy, because many young people do not have a profession and go to lottery counters,” said Yi Xianzhong, an economist from Qingdao University.

China’s Communist Party banned gambling after it came to power in 1949, but state-run sports lotteries became wildly popular after they were launched in the 1980s.

Lottery products are often sold in the form of physical lottery tickets from authorized sellers.

A street vendor in eastern China’s Zhejiang province celebrated winning a 26 million yuan jackpot this week by destroying his own street food stall in a video that went viral on social media.

Although China’s economy has not been hit as hard as that of some Western countries, it has also been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, with the government in Beijing abandoning draconian measures introduced to prevent the spread of the coronavirus only late last year. year.