Gambling participation is on the decline in France but the ranks of problem gamblers is on the rise, presenting a dilemma for the country’s new gambling regulatory body.

A new report by Observatoire des jeux (ODJ), a French government agency tasked with monitoring the nation’s gambling activity, found that 47.2% of over 10k respondents admitted to engaging in some form of gambling in 2019. That’s a significant decline from the 57.2% who admitted gambling in the 2014 survey.

However, the 2019 report showed 1.6% of gamblers displayed signs of excessive gambling activity – twice the 0.8% rate of 2014 – while a further 4.4% were deemed to be at moderate risk of becoming problem gamblers, up from 3.8% in 2014.

Extrapolating these figures to the population at large, 0.8% (370k) of French adults can be considered problem gamblers while another 2.1% (1m) are at moderate risk of earning that dubious designation.