Study on tobacco pricing and packaging strategies concludes

23 Mar 2022
23 Mar 2022

A five-year project, which examined the impact of tobacco pricing and packaging strategies on tobacco use and equity in middle-income countries, came to an end in March 2022. This project was a collaborative project between REEP members and colleagues in South America and Vietnam.

While some of the work was done separately by each country team, some was collaborative. The aim of the project was to examine the impact of tobacco pricing and packaging strategies on tobacco use and equity in Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, South Africa, and Vietnam. The team studied the impact of tobacco prices on smoking onset, smoking cessation, and tobacco consumption. The team also investigated the impact of plain cigarette packaging on cigarette demand using a discrete choice experiment.

Corne van Walbeek, Hana Ross, and Nicole Vellios were involved in this project over the full five years. Several postdocs have been involved at various time, including Abel Nyagwachi, Alfred Mukong, Zachary Gitonga, and Micheal Boachie.

The final two research papers from South Africa are on smoking cessation and plain packaging. The results are being finalised and will be submitted as part of Nicole’s PhD dissertation. The smoking cessation paper focuses predominantly on the effect of price on a smoker’s decision to quit. The results indicate that a 10% increase in the price of cigarettes results in a 5.5%−8.6% increase in quitting. The results from the discrete choice experiment indicate that, among smokers and non-smokers, plain packaging with graphic health warnings decreases consumers’ utility from cigarettes and increases perceptions of health harm. The results of the discrete choice experiment will be used to advance the implementation of plain packaging in South Africa. Although plain packaging was proposed four years ago in the draft Control of Tobacco Products and Electronic Delivery Systems Bill, it has not been passed.

The global team is currently finalising two systematic reviews. The one is on choice experiments that examine plain packaging, and the other is on socioeconomic differences in the effect of price and tax increases on tobacco use in low- and middle-income countries.

The South African team was funded by the International Development Research Centre and the South African Medical Research Council, and the research was conducted under the umbrella of the Global Alliance for Chronic Diseases, a global alliance of health research funders. We thank them for their support.

To date (March 2022), 18 research papers funded by this grant have been published in peer-reviewed journals. 11 of these involve UCT researchers. These are shown in bold.

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