The Bill China Cannot Afford HEALTH, ECONOMIC and SOCIAL COSTS of CHINA’S TOBACCO EPIDEMIC
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The Bill China Cannot Afford HEALTH, ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL COSTS OF CHINA’S TOBACCO EPIDEMIC The Bill China Cannot Afford HEALTH, ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL COSTS OF CHINA’S TOBACCO EPIDEMIC Acknowledgements This report was written by Angela Pratt (World Health Organization–WHO) and Andrea Pastorelli (United Nations Development Programme–UNDP), with the support of Trinette Lee. The modelling included in this report commissioned by WHO and UNDP was conducted by Yang Lian (Chengdu University of Traditional Chinese Medicine) and her colleagues Tehwei Hu, Zhongzheng Mao and Qun Sun; Stéphane Verguet (Harvard University) and his colleagues Cindy L. Gauvreau, Prabhat Jha, Lingrui Liu, Sujata Mishra, Gillian Tarr, Yue Xiao, Qiu Yingpeng and Kun Zhao; and Christopher Millett (Imperial College London) and his colleagues Sanjay Basu and Anthony Laverty. We are also grateful to the following colleagues who reviewed the report and provided valuable feedback: Tom Carroll, Quan Gan, Mark Goodchild, Luminita Hayes, Teh-Wei Hu, Judith Mackay, Susan Mercado, Jeremias Paul Jr., Vinayak Prasad, Nadia Rasheed, Bernhard Schwartländer, Roy Small, Ferdinand Strobel, Steve Tamplin, Kazuyuki Uji, Douglas Webb, Xi Yin and Rose Zheng. Funding for this report was provided by WHO, with the support of Bloomberg Philanthropies and UNDP. © World Health Organization 2017 ISBN 978 92 9061 790 7 Some rights reserved. This work is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 IGO licence (CC BY-NC- SA 3.0 IGO; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/igo). Under the terms of this licence, you may copy, redistribute and adapt the work for non-commercial purposes, provided the work is appropriately cited, as indicated below. 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No. (632) 521-1036, email: [email protected] CONTENTS Foreword ii Executive summary iv 1. Introduction 1 2. Economic and social costs of tobacco use in China 10 3. Economic and social benefits of tobacco control 16 4. The policy path to reducing tobacco use in China 24 5. Conclusions and recommendations 29 References 32 Annexes 35 A. Summary of Economic costs attributable to smoking in China 2014 35 B. Summary of Equity and poverty alleviation benefits of tobacco tax and smoke-free workplaces in China: a modelling study 39 C. Summary of The policy path to reducing tobacco use 42 THE BILL CHINA CANNOT AFFORD FOREWORD Tobacco use kills approximately 6 million people globally every year and is a significant threat to health and development. It is one of the main risk factors driving the growing epidemic of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, lung diseases and other NCDs are now the world’s biggest killers – responsible for over 60% of all deaths and over 80% of deaths in China. Over three quarters of NCD deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries, as do 82% of premature NCD deaths. Tobacco use hurts families, impoverishes communities, exacerbates inequalities, and damages economies and societies. We will have difficulty reaching the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) vision of a more equitable, healthy and sustainable world without seriously tackling the global tobacco threat. China is the epicentre of this epidemic, and thus lies at the heart of global efforts to stop it. China is the world’s largest producer and consumer of tobacco. A staggering 44% of the world’s cigarettes are smoked in China. One million people die of tobacco-related diseases in China every year, many of them in the prime of their productive years. The purchase of cigarettes imposes a financial burden on low-income smokers and their families, but the illness, disability and death caused by tobacco use extracts an even greater cost – with such high rates of smoking among Chinese men, tobacco use is killing or disabling the main wage earner in many Chinese families (especially families on low incomes) and plunging those already on the margins into poverty. If nothing is done to slow these trends, smoking-related diseases are on track to claim more than 200 million lives in China this century. This will decrease economic productivity and push tens of millions of people into poverty. It will also place increasing demands on the Chinese social welfare and health systems, as well as the private sector, and will further entrench already growing inequalities. The health and broader (social, economic, environmental) costs of tobacco use add up to a bill that China cannot afford. Yet, all of this is preventable. This report shows that through implementation of a comprehensive package of strong tobacco control policies, China could avert many millions of preventable deaths, as well as mitigate the impact tobacco use is having on China’s society and economy. Increasing the retail price of cigarettes by 50%, for example, would save 20 million lives over 50 years and prevent 8 million people from being plunged into poverty. A well-enforced national policy to make all offices smoke free would avert at least 6 million deaths and avoid 2 million people becoming impoverished. A comprehensive national smoke-free law, including all public places, would deliver even greater health and equity gains. Strong tobacco control policies are therefore not only pro-health – and thus consistent with the Healthy China vision of the Government are also pro-poor and positive for the economy. Tobacco control will deliver a sustainable return on investment in the form of a healthier, more equitable and productive country. ii HEALTH, ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL COSTS OF CHINA’S TOBACCO EPIDEMIC In the adopting of the SDGs, the international community recognized that tobacco control is a priority issue, for health and for development more broadly. The SDGs commit governments to implement the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC), which China ratified in 2005. Scaled-up implementation of the WHO FCTC be constitute a huge step towards delivering on the vision articulated in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development – of a world transformed,