Albany - New York state plans to award its first full-scale casino licenses this week as Caesars Entertainment and Genting vie to build a gambling palace within an hour's drive of the Big Apple's 8.4 million residents.

Four other publicly traded companies - Empire Resorts, Penn National Gaming, Churchill Downs and Full House Resorts - are among 16 bids for as many as four licenses. Winners are scheduled to be selected by the Gaming Facility Location Board on Dec. 17.

The biggest prize among three regions approved for casinos is the Catskill Mountains-Orange County area, parts of which are 50 miles from New York City. State officials there seek to balance economic growth in the Catskills, a faded resort destination, against the potential for reaping more tax revenue in Orange County, which is closer to the city. Mohegan Sun has proposed a project for Thompson, N.Y., one of three proposals for the Catskills.

"New York City is the Holy Grail," said Srihari Rajagopalan, an analyst at UBS Securities LLC. "The casino customer prefers convenience over amenities."

The awards represent the last major prize in a round of expansion that has seen Ohio, Maryland, Kansas and Massachusetts approve Las Vegas-style gambling parlors during the past five years. The winners will get to open potentially lucrative casinos in the third-most-populous U.S. state. The losing companies, most of which already operate on the East Coast, will face new competition in an already saturated market.

New York became the largest U.S. state to allow non-Indian casinos when voters approved a constitutional amendment last year. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, D, who backed the amendment, says the casinos may add as much as $430 million to state and local coffers.

Last week, he said he didn't have an opinion on who gets a license.

"We set up the process that has a separate board making the decision," Cuomo said at a Dec. 11 press briefing in Albany. "They should just do their job and go through the law and pick the best operators."

The expansion comes as growth in the $38 billion U.S. gambling industry slowed to 1.2 percent last year, from 4.8 percent in 2012, Fitch Ratings said last month in a report. In Atlantic City, New Jersey, about 130 miles south of Manhattan, four of 12 casinos closed this year. A bid to close a fifth, the Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort, is in bankruptcy court.