Despite their lethality, cigarettes are subject to little regulation that directly restricts their contents or their legality. This may change in the near future with the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), the world's first global health treaty, now in force, as well as developments in a few individual countries. Cigarettes are subject to a substantial number of country-specific re...

Background Globally, over 300 million people consume diverse smokeless tobacco (ST) products. They are addictive, cause cancer, increased cardiovascular mortality risks and poor pregnancy outcomes. Purpose of Review To identify gaps in implementing key ST demand-reduction measures, focused literature reviews were conducted and findings synthesized according to relevant WHO Framework Conventio...

AIMS To explore attitudes towards, and experience of, illicit tobacco usage in a disadvantaged community against a backdrop of austerity and declining national trends in illicit tobacco use. DESIGN Qualitative study using 10 focus groups. SETTING Multiply disadvantaged community in Nottingham, United Kingdom. PARTICIPANTS Fifty-eight smokers, ex- and non-smokers aged 15-60 years. MEASUR...

In this paper I develop an overlapping generations model that incorporates bad behaviors (such as smoking and unhealthy eating habits that lead to obesity) to investigate the equilibrium effects of different cost sharing mechanisms and excise taxation on bad behaviors and medical expenditures. I show that while higher cost sharing induces individuals to refrain from bad behaviors, it has mixed ...

This paper provides a critique of the global crusade recently launched by the World Bank and World Health Organization against tobacco, by providing some welfare estimates of the net costs associated from the rise in taxes that is proposed for India, S.Africa, S.Korea, Japan and the European Union. It critically examines conventional studies of the costs-benefits of smoking which besides ignori...

OBJECTIVE To establish the trends in prevalence, and correlates, of roll-your-own (RYO) use in Canada, USA, UK and Australia, 2002-2008. METHODS Participants were 19,456 cigarette smokers interviewed during the longitudinal International Tobacco Control (ITC) Four-Country Survey in Canada, USA, UK, and Australia. RESULTS "Predominant" RYO use (i.e., >50% of cigarettes smoked) increased sign...

OBJECTIVE To determine the impact of tobacco control policies and mass media campaigns on smoking prevalence in Australian adults. METHODS Data for calculating the average monthly prevalence of smoking between January 2001 and June 2011 were obtained via structured interviews of randomly sampled adults aged 18 years or older from Australia's five largest capital cities (monthly mean number of...

Previous systematic reviews of population-level tobacco control interventions and their effects on smoking inequality by socioeconomic factors concluded that tobacco taxation reduce smoking inequality by income (although this is not consistent for other socioeconomic factors, such as education). Inconsistent results have been reported for socioeconomic differences, especially for other tobacco ...

The net effects of switching from consumption taxation to inflation taxation on resource allocation and welfare crucially depend on production externalities. With elastic labor supply, raising inflation taxation decreases leisure, but increases the levels of real consumption, capital, and output. Moreover, this tax switch has two opposing effects on the level of real money balances: A positive ...