Smoking

Studies evaluating the mortality of smoking and its financial burden belong to the mainstream of current research of health economists. The author did such a study on the Czech Republic data. However, he decided to go deeper. His main motivation was to compute a fair excise tax on cigarettes. He defined ¿fairness¿ as a situation in which there is no net redistribution of state budget funds between two groups of citizens: smokers and non-smokers. Smokers create benefits (for example, savings on pensions due to their earlier deaths) and costs (for instance, increased health care costs) for the state budget. He searched for a tax rate that would balance these costs and benefits. He hopes that the study will stir both academic and public debate about cigarette consumption and its financial impact.