Analysis of cigarette demand of the industrial workers

Abstract

The main goal of this research was to study the factors which will lead to decrease the smoking prevalence rate. Since smoking is a vital problem with which most people feel concerned,especially due to its widely known adverse effects to health, various smoking control measures have been supported by the Thai government and many private organizations. Some of these control measures have included issuing legal measures to discourage smoking and holding anti-smoking campaigns. Yet, smoking is still a major problem these days, despite many new regulations. This study concentrates on analyzing the significant factors that effect on the probability of continue to smoke, demand for cigarettes of smokers and the probability of smoking of workers. The research has been conducted by surveying 378 industrial workers from eight industries in Bang Khun Thian district, Bangkok Metropolis. In order to determine the significant factors affecting the cigarette demand, the collected data were analyzed by the ordinary least square. The binary logistic regression was also applied to find out the significant factors affecting the probability of continue tosmoke and the probability of cigarette smoking. The analysis results provide some useful information to the government for creating effective regulation to reduce the smoking prevalence rate. The study showed that a 1% increase in the degree of disease awareness can induce a 2.4% decrease in the demand for cigarettes. On the other side, a 1% increase in work hour leads to a 0.5% increase in cigarette demand. Moreover, the longer smokers have been smoking, the less probability of quitting smoking in the future. Unfortunately, for industrial workers, the price mechanism does not work. Simply raising the price of cigarettes does little to reduce the amount of cigarettes smoked by them. Moreover, the income is not a significant factor. But result indicates that highly paidworkers have less probability of cigarette smoking than the lowly paid workers. However, the difference is very small. Finally, it should be added that all of the nonsmokers questioned havedefinitely decided not try to smoke in the future because they have recognized that cigarette smoking causes many diseases. However, it should be noted that this study was completed within a limited time, so it was impossible to interview all workers in every factory. It would be recommended that future studies cover other industrial areas, and with more collected information, the results would be more accurateand insightful.