Economics of Tobacco Control (Part 3): Evidence from the ITC Project

This editorial is a background paper for Part 3 of the Economics of Tobacco Control: Evidence from the International Tobacco Control (ITC) Policy Evaluation Project supplement.

This supplement contains nine papers that consider these and other issues. All nine papers are based on data collected by the International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Project (ITC Project). The ITC Project, created in 2002, is an international evidence-gathering system that has evaluated WHO FCTC policies and has grown from the original four countries (Canada, the USA, the UK and Australia) to 29 countries, covering over half of the world’s population and over two-thirds of the world’s tobacco users. The ITC Project was the first, and is still the only, international research program with a focus on WHO FCTC impact evaluation. Across the 29 countries, over 110 survey waves of data have been collected to date (October 2018). The commonality of the ITC methods and measures allows for cross-country comparisons. The ITC data are longitudinal, meaning that broadly the same group of people are surveyed across different waves. This allows researchers to draw much stronger conclusions than if the ITC Project performed a repeated cross-sectional survey in each round of data collection.