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Mission Winnow Undermines Sports Sponsorship Bans in Auto Racing
Formula 1 (F1) auto-racing is one of the most watched sporting events on Earth. In 2018, over 490 million people tuned their televisions to watch. Auto racing’s history is deeply intertwined with tobacco company sponsorship. Tobacco branding often invokes sporting imagery to draw a connection between athletic achievement and a particular brand. The influence of…
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Blog
The Tobacco Industry is Not an Economic Development Partner
Recently, murmurs in the development community have posited that mainly because of its strong supply chains and high profitability, a re-tooled tobacco industry might be a suitable development partner. A recent article by tobacco farming researchers across six countries systematically debunks this notion by demonstrating why the tobacco industry has proven to be a mostly…
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Blog
A Case for Banning the Sale of Filtered Cigarettes
After the 1950s, the cigarette began to evolve from being a paper tube with shredded dried tobacco leaf into a product that also included an acetate tow filter. The filtered cigarette was marketed by tobacco companies as a healthier, milder option for the more image and health conscious smoker. Years after such marketing was stripped…
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Cigarette consumption has been increasing in Bangladesh even after a decade of tax and price increases: What went wrong?
Despite a high share of tax in price (greater than the WHO’s 75% benchmark) with periodic tax and price increases, cigarette consumption has been increasing in Bangladesh over the last decade. Between 2006-07 and 2016-17, the volume of tax-paid cigarette sales increased by 83%. At the same time, the share of low-price cigarette consumption increased…
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Differences in cigarette prices across EU Member States affect cross-border cigarette purchases
The European Union (EU) has been one of the world’s champions of high cigarette excise taxes. Thanks in part to its Tobacco Tax Directive, the EU is the region with the highest average cigarette prices in the world. As we wrote in a previous blog post, the European Commission is, encouragingly, working on a possible…
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Tobacco control community’s strong voice in the EU Tobacco Tax Directive revision process
The European Union (EU) is the region with the highest cigarette prices in the world on average. Each year, high cigarette prices help many European Union residents stick to their long-term goals of living healthy and productive lives. The high cost of cigarettes encourages large number of smokers to quit and discourages millions of non-smokers…
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The Tobacco Industry Uses Pricing to Undermine Tobacco Tax Policy: Evidence from Bangladesh
The effectiveness of a tax increase in reducing tobacco use depends on the extent to which the tobacco industry passes on the tax increase to consumers. It is well-known by now that the industry absorbs tax increases more commonly for cheaper brands, for which demand is more price sensitive and holding prices down is critical…
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Nearly 70 Million Smokers in Latin America are at Risk of Tobacco-Related Death and Disease
November 13, 2018 (New York, USA) – Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans continue to die every year from tobacco-related disease, according to the American Cancer Society and Vital Strategies, co-publishers of the Tobacco Atlas, Sixth Edition, now available in Spanish. While the proportion of the population who use tobacco has nearly halved across the…
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Countering the Narrative of Prosperity for Smallholder Tobacco Farmers: Evidence from Kenya
In recent years, there has been a systematic shift in tobacco farming to the world’s lower-Human Development Index (HDI) countries that tend to struggle economically and where governance is often weak. With little or no evidence, the tobacco industry pushes a loud narrative that tobacco control (e.g., tobacco taxation, smoke-free places, packaging/labeling provisions, marketing bans,…