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China Youth Daily, china.com, chinanews.com, caixin.com and China Plus Reported the Research on the Relationship between Smoking and Health and Poverty by Professor Jin Chenggang's Team

Release time:2021-01-06   views:
  



On December 24, the School of Social Development and Public Policy of Beijing Normal University held a press conference to introduce the research results of the evaluation on the impact of tobacco use on poverty.

To explore the relationship between smoking and health and poverty, Professor Jin Chenggang's research group carried out this study from March 2019 to December 2020. The mixed research design method was adopted. Firstly, qualitative research was carried out to explore the causal path from smoking to poverty. On this basis, questionnaire was designed and field survey was carried out to quantitatively evaluate the impact of tobacco use on poverty. A questionnaire survey was conducted on 2409 families in Hebei, Heilongjiang, Shandong, Henan, Hubei, Sichuan, Guizhou and Shaanxi to evaluate the impact of tobacco use on poverty. The extended regression model of stata16.0 was used for data analysis, and instrumental variables were used to deal with the endogenous problem of smoking.

The results show that the prevalence of tobacco in poverty-stricken areas remains severe and the smoking rate reaches 34.20%, which is far higher than the national average of 26.6%. In addition, compared with the non-poor, the poor people still lack the awareness of the harm of smoking.

The probability of family poverty among smokers increased significantly. Among the respondents, the probability of family poverty of smokers was 23.61%, which was significantly higher than and nearly twice that of non-smokers (13.81%).

Smoking leads to or aggravates poverty through two paths: reducing income and increasing medical expenses. First of all, smoking significantly increases the prevalence of smoking-related chronic diseases, reduces the quality of life of smokers, weakens the labor force, and reduces the income. At the same time, smoking significantly increases the outpatient and hospitalization probability and medical expenses of smokers, crowding out family food and education expenses, which not only aggravates the phenomenon of "falling into or returning to poverty due to illness", but also puts a heavy burden on the national finance. On the other hand, the plight caused by poverty will lead to the high smoking rate of poor families, and then form a vicious circle of smoking - poverty.

Poor people are more sensitive to price, and the increase of tobacco tax will significantly reduce tobacco use. The research results showed that the rise of cigarette prices had an impact on the smoking amount of 46.69% of the smokers. Among these smokers, 61.66% chose to reduce tobacco use, and 13.37% chose to quit smoking. In addition, if the price of regular cigarettes increases by 30%, 50% and 100%, the number of cigarettes people smoke will be reduced by 5.9, 7.6 and 8.8 on average.

Experts attending the meeting agreed that 2020 is not only the year to achieve the goal of building a moderately prosperous society in an all-round way, but also the year to win the battle against poverty in an all-round way. Health is the fundamentality of our body, while tobacco is an important factor leading to a variety of diseases. Only by doing a good job in prevention, combining tobacco control with the health poverty alleviation strategy, increasing tobacco tax and strengthening health education to prevent the poor from diseases, can we consolidate the great achievements of China's poverty alleviation.

Related news report links:

CHINA PLUS

http://chinaplus.cri.cn/podcast/detail/1/2689924

China Youth News

http://zqb.cyol.com/html/2020-12/29/nw.D110000zgqnb_20201229_4-05.htm

china.com

http://guoqing.china.com.cn/2020-12/25/content_77050623.htm

chinanews.com

https://www.chinanews.com/sh/2020/12-24/9370315.shtml

caixin.com

http://www.caixin.com/2020-12-25/101643229.html