Tobacconomics Cigarette Tax Scorecard, 3rd edition - launches 21 May 2024
The third edition of the Tobacconomics Cigarette Tax Scorecard launched on 21st May 2024, and shows that governments have made insufficient progress in addressing one of the world’s leading causes of preventable death: tobacco use. Specifically, despite established evidence that the most effective tool—tobacco taxation—consistently reduces smoking and increases tax revenues, governments are falling far short on implementation. Cigarettes are affordable in most countries and becoming more affordable in too many. The Scorecard measures countries’ tobacco taxation performance across four key components, providing a blueprint for governments to address their shortcomings and reap the enormous benefits of this policy.
Found at www.tobacconomics.org, the Scorecard utilizes the latest data (2023) from the biennial World Health Organization Report on the Global Tobacco Epidemic as well as macroeconomic data from the World Bank and other sources to assess countries’ cigarette tax policies with respect to consistency with the widely accepted best practices of cigarette taxation. The Scorecard presents four key components: cigarette price, change in affordability, tax structure, and tax share of retail price. Experts utilize the latest data from the WHO to evaluate how countries are performing relative to evidence-based best practices in tobacco taxation.
The Scorecard finds that the global average cigarette tax score dropped down to 1.99 out of five points in 2022 following a modest increase from 1.89 in 2014 to 2.25 in 2020. Overall scores improved in only 31 countries from 2020 to 2022, while scores worsened in 76 countries and stayed the same in 55 countries. Only 68 countries of the 170 for which data are available score 2.50 or higher out of the maximum of five points.
In this latest edition of the Scorecard, France and Mauritius scored the highest with 4.13 points and were also the only countries to receive more than four points. Although five countries scored more than four points in 2020, the scores of all five decreased mainly because of their inability to make cigarettes less affordable.