Taxation or Regulation: Looking for a Good Anti-Smoking Policy

Paul Lanoie and Paul Leclair

CIRANO Working Papers from CIRANO

Abstract: This paper investigates the relative ability of two anti-smoking policies, taxes and regulation, in inducing cigarette demand reductions and in providing incentives to stop smoking (or not to start). The analysis is based on Canadian data at the provincial level for the period 1982-1995. Our results show that cigarette demand responds to taxes (elasticity of 0.28), but not to regulation, while the converse is true for the proportion of smokers in the population. This suggests that both policies are acting in a complementary fashion to influence the incidence of smoking. Cet article examine la performance de deux types de politiques, taxes et réglementation, visant à réduire la consommation de cigarettes et à donner des incitations à arrêter de fumer (ou à ne pas commencer). L'analyse est basée sur des données canadiennes au niveau des provinces pour les années 1982-1995. Nos résultats montrent que la demande de cigarettes est sensible aux changements de taxes (élasticité de 0,28),0501s pas à la réglementation, alors que des résultats inverses sont observés lorsqu'on examine l'impact des politiques sur la décision de fumer ou pas.

Keywords: Taxation; regulation; cigarettes; smoking; policy; Taxes; réglementation; cigarettes; politiques publiques (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1997-06-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cirano.qc.ca/files/publications/97s-30.pdf

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:cir:cirwor:97s-30

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CIRANO Working Papers from CIRANO Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Webmaster ().