Welcome to Economics for Health, the new name for Tobacconomics, an international team of researchers dedicated to producing
rigorous economic evidence that helps to address public health challenges like tobacco use, alcohol use, and more, based
at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Tobacconomics tax policy experts today announced new partnership agreements with six international organizations to conduct economic research that will help inform and shape tobacco control policies in 14 countries in Asia, Latin America and South Eastern Europe. Read More
Today is International Women’s Day, and discussions at the World Conference on Tobacco or Health are focused on the successes and challenges of tobacco control efforts among women. In recognition of this day, we would like to highlight some of our past research, which focuses on weight control beliefs among women that compromise the effectiveness of tobacco control policy. Read More
Today, Bloomberg Philanthropies lauded Argentina for its work to reduce tobacco use and raise tobacco taxes at its biennial Awards for Global Tobacco Control. Argentina was recognized, along with governments and civil society organizations of five other countries (Vietnam, El Salvador, Mexico, Senegal and Uganda) for its commitment to reducing the health and economic burden of tobacco related diseases. The policy efforts of Argentina relied on a unique collaboration between the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Health, and civil society organizations in the reform efforts. In the ceremony today in Cape Town, South Africa, the Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Health and FIC Argentina, a civil society organization, jointly accepted the award. Read More
This week, the Tobacconomics group released a new Policy Brief examining the global evidence linking tobacco use to poverty and the difference tobacco taxation can make in disrupting cyclical poverty. This Brief challenges the assumption that tobacco taxes are regressive and the hurt the poor, and instead shows that increasing tobacco taxes are able to reduce tobacco use and its associated cyclical poverty. Read More
The 17th World Conference on Tobacco or Health begins in Cape Town, South Africa this week (7-9 March 2018), and the first time the conference is being held in Africa. The is significant because South Africa has been a global tobacco control leader in the past twenty years by implementing tobacco control policies well before many other low- and middle-income countries. The success of these policies led to smoking prevalence declining from above 30% in the early 1990s to 16% at present. Furthermore, much of this reduction was a result of tobacco tax policies, which came to be recognized as ‘best practice’ that still serves a model for many other low- and middle-income countries. Read More
Tobacco use poses an unparalleled health and economic burden worldwide. A new study found that the diseases caused by smoking account for US$ 422 billion in health care expenditures annually, representing almost 6% of global spending on health. Smoking causes close to 6 million deaths per year – more than the deaths from HIV/AIDs, TB, and Malaria combined. And the total economic cost of smoking after including productivity losses from death and disability amounts to more than US$ 1.4 trillion per year – equivalent in magnitude to 1.8% of the world’s annual GDP.
Globally, the public health and economic burden of tobacco is increasingly carried by low- and middle- income countries rather than high-i Read More
Dr. Chaloupka was interviewed by Bloomberg Philanthropies' Jo Birckmayer on February 23, 2017, in New York City. This was Bloomberg Philanthropies' first Facebook LIVE episode in a new series called The Big Idea. They discussed the basics of tobacco taxation and why it is such an important policy tool to reduce the death and disease caused by tobacco use worldwide. Dr. Chaloupka also authored a blog post for Bloomberg Philanthropies describing 5 Things You Should Know About Tobacco Taxes. Read More
Tobacco use is the leading cause of non-communicable diseases like cancer, heart disease, and stroke. Every year, about six million people worldwide die from tobacco use, with the vast majority of deaths in low- and middle-income countries. We also know that tobacco use costs the world’s economies over US $1.4 trillion annually in healthcare expenditures and lost productivity. Read More
Tobacconomics team members played key roles as scientific editors, co-authors, and reviewers of a new report by the National Cancer Institute and the World Health Organization, which finds that tobacco control measures are highly cost-effective and do not harm economies. However, while progress is now being made in controlling the global tobacco epidemic, existing measures have not yet been used to their full potential. ? Read More
