wiiw launches research network on tobacco and other health-related taxes in Central and Eastern Europe
16 July 2024
Taxes on harmful products improve health and reduce public costs. A new research network in seven CEE countries aims to better understand them – starting with tobacco – and to help drive policy change
image credit: istock.com/Khaosai Wongnatthakan
Earlier this year, the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies (wiiw) launched its Taxes for Health Initiative (THEi), an international research network on tobacco and other health-related taxes, focusing on seven Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries: Bulgaria, Georgia, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Turkey, and Ukraine. The project, which is headquartered at wiiw, is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies. The research network is managed by wiiw researchers Biljana Jovanovikj, Nóra Kungl and Kristijan Fidanovski, with Professor Hana Ross as an external consultant.
Health taxes comprise excise taxes on tobacco, alcohol, sugar-sweetened beverages and other harmful products that damage health and generate a wide range of negative consequences for society by lowering life expectancy and productivity, while increasing healthcare spending and morbidity. Price-related measures, including excise tax increases, constitute the most important and cost-effective component of a policy toolkit to control the damage done by these substances. Currently, tobacco control is the research focus of the THEi initiative.
Despite considerable tobacco control reforms and other measures in the past few decades, smoking remains the leading cause of preventable deaths worldwide. CEE countries continue to exhibit some of the highest rates of smoking prevalence (proportion of smokers in the population) and smoking intensity (number of cigarettes consumed per smoker) in the world. Among countries with more than 1 m citizens, Serbia and Bulgaria had the joint-third highest smoking prevalence rates globally (39.5%) in 2022, according to the World Health Organisation. In the EU, the populations of all but two CESEE countries smoke considerably more than the EU average.
THEi responds to the lack of policy attention to CEE countries in the public health community. These countries are under-supported in their tobacco control efforts, despite suffering significant adverse public health consequences from the high prevalence of smoking. THEi joins an extensive and long-standing tobacco control campaign (the Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use), which has invested USD 1.58bn since 2005, helping to drive policy change in dozens of countries and potentially saving hundreds of thousands of lives.
Currently, wiiw’s network via THEi also includes the Institute of Economic Sciences in Serbia, the Institute for Structural Research in Poland, the Institute for Economic Research in Bulgaria, the Aspen Institute in Romania, the Centre for Economic Strategy in Ukraine, the Econometric Research Association in Turkey, and the Georgian Institute of Public Affairs in Georgia.