May 11, 2008
The Undercover Economist: Happiness is a more expensive nicotine hit
Would smokers prefer that cigarettes be expensive? The Office of Fair Trading seems to think so, to judge by its recent announcement alleging that some supermarkets and tobacco companies had been fixing the price of tobacco.
Certainly, higher cigarette prices would make smokers healthier. There is plenty of evidence that smoking is very bad for you, and almost as much evidence that people smoke fewer cigarettes if they are expensive. But “healthy smokers” are not the same thing as happy smokers.
So, do high cigarette prices make smokers happier? If smokers are rational, they don’t. But if smokers are wracked by temptation and are trying unsuccessfully to quit, then higher prices might make them happier by encouraging them to smoke less, or even to stop entirely.
The remainder of this column can be read here. Please post comments below.
I don’t think that increasing the price of cigarettes will actually help all smokers, purely because smokers who don’t want to quit could be forced in to poverty. They may still smoke the same amount every day but would have less income due to the tax increase, I’m assuming the price increase would go straight Alistair Darling. We have all heard of fuel poverty, increasing cigarette prices could lead to smokers poverty. Research shows that smoking is linked to poverty, therefore making the people in relative poverty pay even more for their cigarettes, will force them even deeper into relative poverty.
Posted by: Joel Campion | May 13th, 2008 at 10:49 am | Report this comment