A Toolkit on Using Household Expenditure Surveys for Research in the Economics of Tobacco Control

The primary purpose of this toolkit is to guide researchers interested in carrying out research on the economics of tobacco control, especially in the LMICs where household expenditure surveys (HES) on the consumption of different tobacco products exist. This toolkit will review select economic tools and techniques that can be used to analyze HES data with the sole purpose of aiding research on the economics of tobacco control. It will demonstrate the use of HES to estimate some of the important issues in the economics of tobacco control including the estimation of own- and cross-price elasticities as well as expenditure elasticity for tobacco products, the impact of tobacco spending on intra-household resource allocation and consumption of specific groups of commodities within a household, and the impact of tobacco spending and associated healthcare expenditures on national poverty headcounts. It will briefly discuss the theoretical background and economic rationale of each of these issues, methods of estimation, and the use of the statistical software, Stata®, to implement these methods.

This toolkit is one of several toolkits developed by the World Bank, WHO and Tobacconomics which focus on providing guidance on conducting an economic analysis of tobacco demand, the impact of tobacco consumption on employment, equity, illicit trade, and on economic costs. This is also the first in a series of Tobacconomics toolkits designed to build capacity and core competencies in the economic analysis of tobacco taxation which would support advancing the economic arguments for, and countering the arguments against, tobacco tax increases.

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Tobacconomics hosted a webinar on this toolkit on March 20th, 2019.

View the Updated Toolkit from April 2023 here.