Blog

Tobacco Taxes for Lung Health!

In an effort to raise awareness about the negative consequences of smoking tobacco products, the World Health Organization (WHO), along with many other global partners, celebrates World No Tobacco Day every year on May 31st. This year, the theme is tobacco and lung health. In today’s blog, we’re expanding the campaign’s primary focus area—the negative impact smoking has on lung health—to look at economic burden of tobacco-related lung disease, and how fiscal policy tools, such as taxation can help reduce smoking rates and thus, tobacco-related lung disease. Read More

Tobacconomics Research World Tour: Fourth Stop—Bangladesh

The last stop on our research tour is Dhaka, Bangladesh. On April 7th, one of our think tank partners in Bangladesh, BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD), hosted a workshop for policy makers, the media, academics and civil society stakeholders about their research on the economics of tobacco taxation in the country. Read More

Tobacconomics Research World Tour: Third Stop—Romania

The next stop on our research tour is Bucharest, Romania. From March 27-29th Tobacconomics team members participated in the 4th International Conference of the European Network for Smoking and Tobacco Prevention (ENSP). There, we were joined by seven of our think tank partners in the Southeastern Europe (SEE) consortium, which is led by the Institute of Economic Sciences (IES) in Belgrade, Serbia. Read More

Tobacconomics Research World Tour: Second stop—Indonesia

Last week, we took you along with us on our trip to Karachi, Pakistan, for SPDC’s seminar on the “Macroeconomic Impacts of Tobacco Use in Pakistan.” This week, we will be discussing a recent event organized by our partner, Prakarsa, in Jakarta, Indonesia, held on March 27th. The purpose of this meeting was to launch and present their new research: “The Illicit Cigarette Trade in Indonesia.” We are excited to disseminate these noteworthy findings, so let’s begin! Read More

Tobacconomics Research World Tour: First stop—Pakistan

During the month of April, we’ll be taking a world tour of recent research in Pakistan; Indonesia; Romania; Chile; and Bangladesh—all delivered by Tobacconomics think tank partners. In last month’s series, we explored our approach to think tank capacity building through a series of blogs. This month, we’ll be sharing the proof of concept to highlight several dissemination events that have taken place in the last several weeks. Let’s begin in Karachi! Read More

The Tobacconomics Approach to Think Tank Capacity Building: Current Research from the First Year and the Way Forward, & Future Research

Over the past three weeks, we have taken to our blog to reflect on our first two years of the think tank capacity building project, “Accelerating Progress on Tobacco Taxes in Low- and Middle-Income Countries.” In this series, we have defined our purpose and direction for think tank capacity building. A few questions we initially asked ourselves were: Why capacity building? What capacities are we seeking to build? The answers to those questions lay the foundation to formulate our purpose and six core competencies of analysis in the economics of tobacco control. Read More

The Tobacconomics Approach to Think Tank Capacity Building: Our Research Process

If you are a new reader to this series, we have already released the first two blogs: the ‘what’ and ‘why’, and the ‘who’, ‘where’, and ‘how’ on our approach to think tank capacity building. We discussed our reasoning for capacity building in the first place, what capacities we sought to build, and our scoping process in finding the think tank partners we work with today on the project, “Accelerating Progress on Tobacco Taxes in Low- and Middle-Income Countries.” In this blog, we will be discussing our research process: how we worked with partners and sought input from policy makers and advocates to identify evidence gaps, selected research topics, assessed data availability and training needs, and ensured quality research and timely delivery—all with the goal of increasing evidence-based policymaking on tobacco taxation. Read More