| Poverty is a worldwide problem.President Xi Jinping proposed the goal of eradicating the absolute poverty in China in 2020,which will lift the current rural poor from poverty situation and achieve the historic goal of eliminating the overall absolute poverty in China.However,those multidimensional poverty,relative poverty and potential vulnerabilities to poverty still exist during the post-poverty period.Illness is the most important cause of poverty in China.Illness-induced poverty and falling again to poverty due to illness are the hardest fraction of poor.In the poverty caused by the disease,chronic diseases are the major ones which are labeled with complex causes,long duration,delayed healing,easily lead to complications,etc.Numerous medical evidence show that smoking are the main risk factors of chronic diseases,cancer,chronic respiratory disease and cardiovascular.China is the global epidemic center of tobacco use,and the world's largest producer and consumer of tobacco products,which brings tremendous hazards to the public health of China.At the same time,the spending on tobacco products accounts for 1/5 of total daily costs,which crowd out the budget otherwise allocated to daily necessities.Based on the above background and previous research on poverty,we developed the framework of exploring impoverish mechanism of tobacco consumption which will fill the gap of inadequate research on consumer behavior induced poverty in China,and try to propose advice on constructing the new policy system of poverty reducing,which is particular necessary in the period where there's no absolute poverty.This article consists of 8 chapters.In addition to the introduction in Chapter 1,the main content and conclusions of other chapters are summarized as follows.In Chapter 2,based on the development of poverty theory,this paper first sorted out and reviewed relevant literatures according to the theoretical evolution of absolute poverty theory,relative poverty theory,social exclusion theory,capability theory and multidimensional poverty theory.Secondly,this paper defined the income poverty,multidimensional poverty,asset poverty and poverty vulnerability,summarizing and commenting the domestic and foreign literatures on main measurement methods and research frameworks.Finally,from the perspective of healthy human capital,disastrous health impact and crowding out of living expenses,this paper explored the mechanism of tobacco consumption causing poverty on the basis of literature review,and proposed the main research hypothesis of the empirical part of this paper.The research on the impact of tobacco consumption on poverty and the potential pathways were carried out in the following four chapters.In Chapter 3,we explored the impact of tobacco consumption on income poverty.Based on the FGT index,which is used to measure the income poverty,we tried to explore the impact of tobacco consumption on income poverty incidence,poverty depth and poverty intensity,and the potential mechanism with CFPS panel data of five phases(2010-2018).The results show that tobacco consumption significantly increases an individual's risk of falling into income poverty and increased the depth and intensity of poverty among already-poor groups.The results of mechanism analysis show that the possible mechanism of tobacco consumption on income poverty is health human capital,that is,tobacco consumption will lead to an increase in the probability of personal illness and then lead to a decrease in labor remuneration,and this effect is particularly significant in private enterprises and foreign enterprises,which are mainly relied on performance pay.In Chapter 4,we explored the impact of tobacco consumption on multidimensional poverty.With the CFPS panel data of five phases(2010-2018),we adopted the A-F dual cutoff method and selected four dimensions including daily consumption,health,health insurance and wellbeing,exploring and estimating the associations between smoking and unidimensional and multidimensional poverty,and furtherly exploring the causes of multidimensional poverty among smokers by the decomposition of multidimensional poverty index.The results show that tobacco consumption significantly increases the incidence of unidimensional poverty in male health and welfare dimensions,but has no significant effect on consumption and health care dimensions.Further estimates of women sample indicate that the effect of tobacco consumption on the incidence of unidimensional and multidimensional poverty in women is consistent with that of men,and heterogeneity exists only in the health insurance dimension.Tobacco consumption leads to an increase in the incidence of multidimensional poverty in both men and women,and the impact on women is more severe.The results of decomposition analysis of the contribution rate of multidimensional poverty show that health and welfare are the main components of the multidimensional poverty of smokers.In Chapter 5,we explored the impact of tobacco consumption on urban and rural household asset poverty.Using CFPS2012 and 2016 panel data as the analysis data due to the consistency issue,we estimated the household asset index based on poverty line and household asset baskets.With the asset index in two periods,we constructed the dynamic poverty transfer matrix,estimating the path on the dynamic change of household assets,further explored the tobacco consumption's influence on the accumulation of household assets.The results of the dynamic poverty transfer matrix show that the dynamic poverty transfer of urban smoking households is more easily driven by the amount of assets,and the proportion of rural smoking households trapped in poverty due to the lack of assets is higher than that of rural smoking households which are lifted out of poverty by the accumulation of assets.The dynamic change path of household assets shows that there is no multi-equilibrium poverty trap in urban and rural smoking families,but the steady state equilibrium point convergence rate of rural smoking families from poverty to non-poverty is slow.Tobacco consumption significantly reduces the growth rate of household asset accumulation in both urban and rural areas,and the possible transmission mechanism is health shock.In Chapter 6,we explored the impact of tobacco consumption on household poverty vulnerability.For the purpose of consistency of household expenditure and availability of cigarette price data,we selected the CFPS2010 and 2012 panel data.First of all,we estimated the index of vulnerability to poverty based on the measure of vulnerability as expected poverty,and then evaluated the impact of smoking on vulnerability and explored the potential mechanisms.The results show that tobacco consumption significantly leads to an increase in household vulnerability,and the effect is more significant for households that are in the smoking state at the beginning of the period,while the effect is not significant for households that are not smoking at the beginning of the period,indicating that it takes some time for the impact of tobacco consumption on household vulnerability to poverty to emerge.The results of the decomposition analysis of poverty vulnerability show that the higher degree of poverty vulnerability of smoking households is partly due to the lower expected consumption expenditure and partly due to the higher consumption volatility.The lower expected consumption expenditure caused by tobacco consumption is mainly reflected in the crowding out of household food and medical care expenditure,while the higher consumption volatility is due to the crowding out of household savings caused by tobacco consumption,resulting in the poor ability of households to smooth consumption in the face of uncertainty and external risks.Given that tobacco consumption will lead to individual and household poverty from several perspectives,we further explored the effectiveness of tax and price measure,which is recognized as the most effective tobacco control measure to those low incomes,on alleviating the relative poverty within rural and urban residents and the cost and benefit of individual and government.The results of cigarette elasticity show that the price sensitivity of the poor group is higher in both the whole sample and the sub-sample divided into urban and rural areas,indicating that the increase of tobacco tax and the increase of cigarette price has a greater effect on the reduction of cigarette consumption of the poor group.The results of the simulation show that the relative poverty of urban and rural residents due to cigarette consumption is alleviated to a certain extent when cigarette consumption tax is raised and smoking cessation is considered.The results of "healthy China 2030" simulation show that price induced smoking fell can shift those saved income to other necessities,and quitting smoking can save the spending on treating diseases for low-income families,both can reduce the vulnerability to poverty of the family,and improve the welfare level of individual and family;After the tax increase,the increase of government tax revenue mainly sources from the high-income group,while the medical expenditure saved mainly comes from the low-income group.The increased tax revenue and medical expenditure saved by the tax increase can cover about 2/3 of the national financial medical and health expenditure,which is more than 20 times of the national "health poverty alleviation" medical subsidy expenditure.Based on the above conclusions,this paper proposed the following policy suggestions:First of all,in terms of poverty management methods,we suggested the comprehensive use of modern fiscal and tax systems to improve the ability of poverty management.By increasing the consumption tax on cigarettes and thus raising the price of cigarettes,smokers can be encouraged to reduce the amount of smoking or even quit smoking,so as to alleviate all kinds of capacity deprivation caused by tobacco consumption,improve the ability of individuals or families to deal with risks,and reduce the public health expenditure of the government in the protection of national health;At the same time,if the increased cigarette consumption tax revenue can be specially applied to health promotion projects,a virtuous policy cycle mechanism can be formed,which is of great significance to the improvement of poverty governance capacity.Secondly,in terms of poverty identification mechanism,we suggested that tobacco consumption behaviors could be included in the targeted poverty alleviation identification mechanism.Based on the theory of poverty vulnerability,we proposed a preventive mechanism for poverty alleviation,positioning vulnerable families and establishing a poverty vulnerability data monitoring system to dynamically track the vulnerable families.During this process,we suggest to incorporate the smoking behavior into the evaluation system to increase the effectiveness of precise targeting mechanism for poverty alleviation.Finally,on the construction of poverty reduction policy system,we proposed to construct a new poverty reduction policy system through the comprehensive application of modern fiscal policy and public health policy.Perspective will be moved forward and widen to preventive public health policy,which has the function of behavior modification the fiscal and taxation policy,enables the potential target groups to radiation by the multi-dimensional measures,weakened or even avoid the dependence on the depth of the subsidized poverty alleviation policy,encourage its selfdevelopment willingness and ability improvement,urged through the intrinsic motivation of poverty situation.Government health spending saved by reducing prevalence rates through similar smoking-cessation practices could be used to cover low-income people,further reducing the risk of poverty from illness. |
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