Explaining cross-country variation in cigarette consumption

The US Surgeon General's initial report on smoking was nearly 40 years old. All these years, health warnings on cigarette packs have been in place. Despite the "warnings" and concerted efforts to dissuade potential smokers, cigarettes are here to stay. Global cigarette production and consumption have been rising steadily since cigarettes were introduced at the beginning of the 20th century (see Table 1 for evidence on growth during 1960–2000). It is estimated that at present about 1.1 billion people – close to a fifth of the global population – are smokers and the number is expected to rise to more than 1.6 billion by 2025 (World Bank, 1999) [1].This paper has three main objectives: (a) to make a succinct summary of recent (1994 – 2004)1 social science research on cigarette consumption, to ascertain the predominant variables affecting consumption; (b) to investigate the effects of selected socio-economic variables on per capita cigarette consumption by estimating a set of multiple regressions ; and (c) to note their implications.Based on searches for refereed publications in scholarly journals via EBSCO, JSTOR, and EconLit, on the topic of cigarette consumption, we have selected 18 papers for this review and the results are summarized in Table 2. Important variables effecting cigarette consumption include prices of cigarettes, taxation, per capita income, schooling level, age, expenditure on advertisements and other promotional activities, health indicators, and anti-smoking campaigns.The main point about the findings in earlier research is that cigarette consumption has all the features of consumption that is addictive, and yet it is useful for policy purposes to see if any particular socio-economic variables have an important bearing on cigarette consumption in the aggregate.Despite persistent efforts by governmental, inter-governmental and non-governmental agents to significantly reduce cigarette consumption, the ground reality is that consumption has been on the