Project description:Tobacco regulation has been a major component of health policy in the developed world since the UK Royal College of Physicians' and the US Surgeon General's reports in the 1960s. Such regulation, which has intensified in the past two decades, includes cigarette taxation, place-based smoking bans in areas ranging from bars and restaurants to workplaces, and regulations designed to make tobacco products less desirable. More recently, the availability of alternative products, most notably e-cigarettes, has increased dramatically, and these products are just starting to be regulated. Despite an extensive body of research on tobacco regulations, there remains substantial debate regarding their effectiveness, and ultimately, their impact on economic welfare. We provide the first comprehensive review of the state of research in the economics of tobacco regulation in two decades.
Project description:IntroductionSmokeless tobacco (ST) was consumed by 356 million people globally in 2017. Recent evidence shows that ST consumption is responsible for an estimated 652 494 all-cause deaths across the globe annually. The WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) was negotiated in 2003 and ratified in 2005 to implement effective tobacco control measures. While the policy measures enacted through various tobacco control laws have been effective in reducing the incidence and prevalence of smoking, the impact of ST-related policies (within WHO FCTC and beyond) on ST use is under-researched and not collated.Methods and analysisA systematic review will be conducted to collate all available ST-related policies implemented across various countries and assess their impact on ST use. The following databases will be searched: Medline, EMBASE, PsycINFO, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, Scopus, EconLit, ISI Web of Science, Cochrane Library (CENTRAL), African Index Medicus, LILACS, Scientific Electronic Library Online, Index Medicus for the Eastern Mediterranean Region, Index Medicus for South-East Asia Region, Western Pacific Region Index Medicus and WHO Library Database, as well as Google search engine and country-specific government websites. All ST-related policy documents (FCTC and non-FCTC) will be included. Results will be limited to literature published since 2005 in English and regional languages (Bengali, Hindi and Urdu). Two reviewers will independently employ two-stage screening to determine inclusion. The Effective Public Health Practice Project's 'Quality Assessment Tool for Quantitative Studies' will be used to record ratings of quality and risk of bias among studies selected for inclusion. Data will be extracted using a standardised form. Meta-analysis and narrative synthesis will be used.Ethics and disseminationPermission for ethics exemption of the review was obtained from the Centre for Chronic Disease Control's Institutional Ethics Committee, India (CCDC_IEC_06_2020; dated 16 April 2020). The results will be disseminated through publications in a peer-reviewed journal and will be presented in national and international conferences.Prospero registration numberCRD42020191946.
Project description:IntroductionThe world's first global health treaty, WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) aims to reduce tobacco product demand by focusing on tobacco taxes, smoking bans, health warning labels, and tobacco advertising bans. Previous studies almost unanimously suggest that FCTC has prompted countries to implement more effective tobacco demand reduction policies.Aims and methodsBy taking into account the pre-FCTC status, country income level, and state capacity we studied if ratifying FCTC was associated with tobacco demand reduction measures in 2018/2019. We used logistic regression to assess the association of FCTC ratification with adoption demand reduction measures, accounting for years since ratification, baseline status, and other covariates.ResultsExcept for taxes, state of tobacco policy implementation before FCTC ratification did not predict adoption of FCTC policies. Time since FCTC ratification was associated with implementing smoking bans and pictorial HWLs. In contrast, while the tax rate prior to FCTC ratification was positively associated with increased taxes after FCTC ratification, time since FCTC ratification was marginally negatively associated with increases in tobacco taxes.ConclusionsWhile the FCTC was followed by implementation of compliant demand reduction policies, there are still many parties that have not implemented the FCTC, particularly increasing taxes and ending tobacco advertising and promotions.ImplicationsWe assessed changes in tobacco demand reductions measures over 22 years in 193 countries. By using internal tobacco industry documents, we were able establish a baseline before the FCTC negotiations. Unlike previous studies, we included four tobacco demand reductions measures: tobacco taxes, smoking bans, health warning labels, and tobacco advertising ban. The limitation of the study is that we do not have data to describe if demand reduction measures are actually enforced or what their effect on tobacco consumption is.
Project description:Background: Global tobacco control is a major public health issue, as smoking-related disease burden remains high worldwide. The World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO) are the driving forces in global tobacco control. However, little research has focused on their development, financing, decision-making, and accountability structures. Methods: We used two strategies to identify the development and structure of global tobacco control initiatives. First, we reviewed the published literature through electronic databases. Second, we conducted grey literature searching. Results: We identified four periods in the Bank's involvement in global tobacco control, from creation of the evidence base in the 1990s to the implementation of tax reforms. We identified three phases in the WHO's efforts, from its early recognition of the link between tobacco and health risks in the 1970s to its implementation of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. Both organisations are financed by a handful of private philanthropies, and face similar risks for effective tobacco control: reduced accountability and resource mobilisation, poor decision-making authority due to specific donor influence, and difficulty in monitoring and evaluation. Conclusions: Continued attention should be paid not only to the primary health-related outcomes of tobacco use, but also to the decision-making and financing structures to promote tobacco control activities.
Project description:Substantial global effort has been devoted to curtailing the tobacco epidemic over the past two decades, especially after the adoption of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control1 by the World Health Organization in 2003. In 2015, in recognition of the burden resulting from tobacco use, strengthened tobacco control was included as a global development target in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development2. Here we show that comprehensive tobacco control policies-including smoking bans, health warnings, advertising bans and tobacco taxes-are effective in reducing smoking prevalence; amplified positive effects are seen when these policies are implemented simultaneously within a given country. We find that if all 155 countries included in our counterfactual analysis had adopted smoking bans, health warnings and advertising bans at the strictest level and raised cigarette prices to at least 7.73 international dollars in 2009, there would have been about 100 million fewer smokers in the world in 2017. These findings highlight the urgent need for countries to move toward an accelerated implementation of a set of strong tobacco control practices, thus curbing the burden of smoking-attributable diseases and deaths.
Project description:This study applies diffusion of innovations theory to understand network influences on country ratification of an international health treaty, the Framework Convention for Tobacco Control (FCTC). From 2003 to 2014 approximately 90% of United Nations member countries ratified the FCTC. We hypothesized that communication between tobacco control advocates on GLOBALink, a 7000-member online communication forum in existence from 1992 to 2012, would be associated with the timing of treaty ratification. We further hypothesized dynamic network influences such that external influence decreased over time, internal influence increased over time, and the role of opinion leader countries varied over time. In addition we develop two concepts: Susceptibility and influence that uncover the micro-level dynamics of network influence. Statistical analyses lend support to the influence of co-subscriptions on GLOBALink providing a conduit for inter-country influences on treaty ratification and some support for the dynamic hypotheses. Analyses of susceptibility and infection indicated particularly influential countries. These results have implications for the study of policy diffusion as well as dynamic models of behavior change.
Project description:The leaf economics spectrum (LES) describes consistent correlations among a variety of leaf traits that reflect a gradient from conservative to acquisitive plant strategies. So far, whether the LES holds in wetland plants at a global scale has been unclear. Using data on 365 wetland species from 151 studies, we find that wetland plants in general show a shift within trait space along the same common slope as observed in non-wetland plants, with lower leaf mass per area, higher leaf nitrogen and phosphorus, faster photosynthetic rates, and shorter leaf life span compared to non-wetland plants. We conclude that wetland plants tend to cluster at the acquisitive end of the LES. The presented global quantifications of the LES in wetland plants enhance our understanding of wetland plant strategies in terms of resources acquisition and allocation, and provide a stepping-stone to developing trait-based approaches for wetland ecology.
Project description:ObjectivesWe estimated the prevalence of smokeless tobacco (ST) consumption and its associations with tobacco control factors among school-going youth in 18 Western Pacific Region (WPR) countries.MethodsWe analyzed school-based Global Youth Tobacco Survey (2014-2019) microdata from 18 WPR countries and estimated weighted prevalence rates of ST consumption, cigarette smoking, and dual use. We used multilevel binary logistic regression to examine the associations of ST consumption and dual use with demographic variables, exposure to pro-tobacco and anti-tobacco factors, national income, and MPOWER indicators.ResultsData from 58,263 school-going youth were analyzed. The prevalence of past 30-day ST consumption was highest in Kiribati (42.1%), the Marshall Islands (26.1%), Micronesia (21.3%), Palau (16.0%), and Papua New Guinea (15.2%). In adjusted multilevel models, ST consumption and dual use were significantly associated with sex, age, parental smoking, pro-tobacco factors, national income, and MPOWER score. For each unit increase in score for cessation programs, we observed approximately 1.4-fold increases in the odds of youth ST consumption (adjusted odds ratio [aOR], 1.38; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.15 to 1.66) and dual use (aOR, 1.47; 95% CI, 1.16 to 1.86). Similarly, for each unit increase in score for health-related warnings, the odds of both ST consumption (aOR, 0.47; 95% CI, 0.42 to 0.53) and dual use (aOR, 0.35; 95% CI, 0.30 to 0.42) decreased by approximately 60%.ConclusionsThe prevalence of youth ST consumption was substantial in the Pacific Islands, exceeding that of cigarette smoking in some countries. Implementing MPOWER measures for ST products could help reduce ST consumption.
Project description:Mycorrhizal fungi are critical members of the plant microbiome, forming a symbiosis with the roots of most plants on Earth. Most plant species partner with either arbuscular or ectomycorrhizal fungi, and these symbioses are thought to represent plant adaptations to fast and slow soil nutrient cycling rates. This generates a second hypothesis, that arbuscular and ectomycorrhizal plant species traits complement and reinforce these fungal strategies, resulting in nutrient acquisitive vs. conservative plant trait profiles. Here we analyzed 17,764 species level trait observations from 2,940 woody plant species to show that mycorrhizal plants differ systematically in nitrogen and phosphorus economic traits. Differences were clearest in temperate latitudes, where ectomycorrhizal plant species are more nitrogen use- and phosphorus use-conservative than arbuscular mycorrhizal species. This difference is reflected in both aboveground and belowground plant traits and is robust to controlling for evolutionary history, nitrogen fixation ability, deciduousness, latitude, and species climate niche. Furthermore, mycorrhizal effects are large and frequently similar to or greater in magnitude than the influence of plant nitrogen fixation ability or deciduous vs. evergreen leaf habit. Ectomycorrhizal plants are also more nitrogen conservative than arbuscular plants in boreal and tropical ecosystems, although differences in phosphorus use are less apparent outside temperate latitudes. Our findings bolster current theories of ecosystems rooted in mycorrhizal ecology and support the hypothesis that plant mycorrhizal association is linked to the evolution of plant nutrient economic strategies.
Project description:IntroductionThe increasingly inequitable impacts of tobacco use highlight the importance of ensuring developing countries' ongoing participation in global tobacco control. The WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) has been widely regarded as reflecting the high engagement and effective influence of developing countries.MethodsWe examined participation in FCTC governance based on records from the first four meetings of the Conference of the Parties (COP), comparing representation and delegate diversity across income levels and WHO regions.ResultsWhile attendance at the COP sessions is high, there are substantial disparities in the relative representation of different income levels and regions, with lower middle and low income countries contributing only 18% and 10% of total meeting delegates, respectively. In regional terms, Europe provided the single largest share of delegates at all except the Durban (2008) meeting. Thirty-nine percent of low income countries and 27% of those from Africa were only ever represented by a single person delegation compared with 10% for high income countries and 11% for Europe. Rotation of the COP meeting location outside of Europe is associated with better representation of other regions and a stronger presence of delegates from national ministries of health and focal points for tobacco control.ConclusionsDeveloping countries face particular barriers to participating in the COP process, and their engagement in global tobacco control is likely to diminish in the absence of specific measures to support their effective participation.