Cigarette consumers behavior: effects of smoking bans in Brazil

• Autor(a) principal: Steffens, Camila
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da USP
• Texto Completo: http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/12/12138/tde-23112018-172158/
• topic: Área livres de tabaco; Avaliação de impacto; Cigarette economics; Economia da saúde; Economia do cigarro; Fumo; Health economics; Impact evaluation; Smoking; Smoking bans

Approximately 135,000 Brazilians die from smoking-related diseases every year (ERIKSEN et al., 2015). Due to the relevance of smoking as a public health problem, some states and municipalities implemented restrictive smoke-free environments from 2008 onwards. The national regulation became effective only in 2014. In this paper we explore the regional differences in the adoption of this policy to evaluate its impacts on cigarette consumption in Brazil. We propose a difference-in-differences approach to estimate the effects throughout the years on the smoking behavior of two age groups: adults and youths. We also estimate the impacts according to different levels of enforcement among states. We have built our panel using micro data from the National Health Research, collected by the Brazilian Bureau of Statistics (IBGE) in 2013. Our results indicate that smoking bans reduced daily cigarette consumption among young individuals in 7% on average, by reducing smoking initiation. This impact increases to 10% when considering higher enforced smoking bans and vanishes when the law is not enforced. In absolute values, it represents from 64 to 80 thousand less smokers among young individuals in the treated capitals. No impacts were found on smoking initiation and on smoking prevalence among adults, but high enforced smoking bans are related to 1.2% smoking cessation rate. Robustness tests show that the results are consistent. Our paper contributes to the literature providing evidences to developing countries on the effects of tobacco control policies