Illegal tobacco demand: The case of Western Balkan

Vedran Recher

Economic Analysis and Policy, 2020, vol. 66, issue C, 182-193

Abstract: This paper investigates tobacco smuggling in the Western Balkans, a region notorious as the main smuggling route for Western European countries. Data from a large-scale nationally representative survey from seven Western Balkan countries are used to explore smoking habits, attitudes about the illicit market, and characteristics of smokers associated with illicit market demand. Our results show that, while there are substantial differences between countries in the prevalence of illicit market purchases, the attitudes of people across countries are not dissimilar. The logit model is estimated to analyse the characteristics of illicit market buyers. The results show that purchasing on the illicit market can best be predicted by variables approximating people’s social status. People with lower income and higher levels of addiction are more likely to buy illegal tobacco.

Keywords: Smuggling; Tobacco; Logit; Western Balkans (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F19 I18 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0313592619303029
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecanpo:v:66:y:2020:i:c:p:182-193

DOI: 10.1016/j.eap.2020.04.001

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Analysis and Policy is currently edited by Clevo Wilson

More articles in Economic Analysis and Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().