IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cdl/ctcres/qt4x68v8f8.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Tobacco Excise Taxation in South Africa

Author

Listed:
  • Walbeek, Corne van
  • World Health Organization

Abstract

The past ten years have witnessed a major turnabout in government policy on tobacco control in South Africa. Within a relatively short time, government policy has changed from complete apathy to one where the tobacco control measures are regarded as some of the most pro-gressive in the world. South Africa’s tobacco control policy rests on two impor-tant pillars: legislation and excise tax increases. In 1999 the government passed legislation that banned tobacco advertising and sponsorship, prohibited smoking in all pub-lic places (including workplaces), and banned the sale of tobacco to minors. This legislation was an amendment to an act passed in 1993 that prohibited smoking on public transport and introduced health warnings for the first time. As well as increasing the implicit costs of smoking, the legislation prohibiting smoking in public and work places represents a clear transfer of property rights from smok-ers to non-smokers. Whereas previously smokers enjoyed the right to pollute the air, the legislation unambiguously assigns non-smokers the right to unpolluted air. Although the direct impact of the legislation on tobacco consump-tion is still unclear, the legislation has continued the trend of deglamorising smoking in South Africa. As a result, smoking is no longer regarded as socially acceptable by large sections of the population. In the past decade the government has substantially increased the excise tax on tobacco products for health reasons. Since 1994 the nominal tax on cigarettes has increased by nearly 25 per cent each year. Econometric evidence indicates that the resulting price increases have had a significant impact on cigarette consumption. The aim of this paper is to investigate tax increases in some detail.

Suggested Citation

  • Walbeek, Corne van & World Health Organization, 2003. "Tobacco Excise Taxation in South Africa," University of California at San Francisco, Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education qt4x68v8f8, Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, UC San Francisco.
  • Handle: RePEc:cdl:ctcres:qt4x68v8f8
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/4x68v8f8.pdf;origin=repeccitec
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Adél Bosch & Steven F. Koch, 2014. "Using a Natural Experiment to Examine Tobacco Tax Regressivity," Working Papers 434, Economic Research Southern Africa.
    2. Dutra, Lauren M. & Williams, David R. & Gupta, Jhumka & Kawachi, Ichiro & Okechukwu, Cassandra A., 2014. "Human rights violations and smoking status among South African adults enrolled in the South Africa Stress and Health (SASH) study," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 105(C), pages 103-111.
    3. Rosemary Hiscock & Nicole H Augustin & J Robert Branston & Anna B Gilmore, 2020. "Standardised packaging, minimum excise tax, and RYO focussed tax rise implications for UK tobacco pricing," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(2), pages 1-21, February.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cdl:ctcres:qt4x68v8f8. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Lisa Schiff (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://escholarship.org/uc/ctcre/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.