| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣海洋大學 === 航運管理學系 === 98 === According to the estimate by World Health Organization, about 1.3 billion people smoke cigarette in the world. On the average, every year about five million people died from disease caused by cigarette smoking. In Taiwan, every year there are more than 18.8 thousand people died from disease that is related to cigarette smoking. Not only cigarette smoking will increase the risk of disease and reduce life expectation and it will also increase social medical cost. In order to avoid damage to the health by cigarette, the Legislative Yuan passed the Cigarette Hazard Prevention Amendment agenda and increased the cigarette health and welfare tax from ten dollars per pack to twenty dollars. It is estimated the average cigarette price will increase from fifty dollars to seventy dollars. The cigarette tax income can be raised from twenty billion to thirty billion dollars per year.
The purpose of this research is an overall study on the effect on the consumption volume after the levy of cigarette health and welfare tax to understand whether the smoking behavior and consumption habit is suppressed after the implementation of the cigarette health and welfare tax. For example, whether there is reduction in smoking quantity and whether the cigarette brand is changed. In addition, study is conducted on the total consumption of cigarette and an empirical study is also carried out on the effect of the price flexibility of main brand requirement. Therefore, consumers in Keelung who smoke cigarette and have actual purchase of cigarette are the target of questionnaire investigated .
This is to verify whether consumption of cigarette is reduced or the cigarette brand is changed due to the rise of cigarette price and price flexibility is the measurement tool.
The research result shows that when five dollars cigarette health and welfare tax is levied in the first stage, the effect on the cigarette smoking behavior and cigarette smoking habit is insignificant. When the ten dollars cigarette health and welfare tax is levied in the second stage, it shows progressively that consumers change to cheaper cigarette and the cigarette smoking quantity is reduced. Finally, when the twenty dollars cigarette health and welfare tax is levied, consumers switch to cheaper cigarette and about 25% of consumer has quantity reduction behavior and the suppression result is significant. Amongst these, youth, low education standard, low income level is more sensitive to the change in cigarette prices. With the rise in cigarette prices, consumers will select lower price cigarette and even smuggled cigarettes. For high age group, high education standard and high income, when the cigarette price is increased, they will select reduction in smoking quantity and they will not buy low price cigarette. The levy of twenty dollars health and welfare tax actually can reach the expected result of using price to control quantity. For smoking cigarette produced by Taiwan, male, middle to old age and medium low social level occupies the most. For smoking imported cigarette, young and middle age and medium and high social level occupies the most. The consumers of this category include both male and female who tend to prefer import cigarette.
During the levy of ten dollars health and welfare tax, the total cigarette sales volume drop slightly by 3.88%.Whereas, during the levy of twenty dollars health and welfare tax, there is a significant drop of 13.2%. This is due to levy of higher health and welfare tax price and the rise in cigarette price causes drop in cigarette consumption requirement and obviously reaches a restraint effect. In addition, the result of investigation on the price flexibility of various large cigarette companies price shows that the TTL and JTI price flexibilities exceed -1 as -1.06 and -1.89. This point shows that the TTL and JTI price flexibilities are large and sensibility is high; Where as the IMP, BAT, PMI price flexibilities are low and the sensibility is low.
If the government wants to induce rise in cigarette price through increase in cigarette health and welfare tax so as to suppress cigarette consumption and if the increase in cigarette price is little like five dollars and ten dollars, the effect of suppressing cigarette consumption is not significant. If the government intents to reach the effect of using price to control the quantity of consumption then it is suggested to adopt the method of one time large scale increase in cigarette health and welfare tax levy and cigarette smuggling should be strictly prevented. At the same time the government should combine with the civilian cigarette quit smoking group and conduct active quit smoking assistance. With two actions at the same time, may be this can moderate the hazard to the health of our people under the condition of not causing social problem.
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