Tobacco control laws boost revenue, reduce consumption: Findings

​​​​​The Tobacco Control Law, enacted in 2005 and strengthened with a 2013 amendment, has led to an 11-fold increase in revenue from the tobacco sector over the past 18 years.

Alongside this revenue growth, tobacco use in Bangladesh has declined by approximately 18% between 2009 and 2017. This demonstrates that strengthening tobacco control laws can lead to a reduction in tobacco use while simultaneously increasing tax revenue.

Speakers highlighted these findings during a discussion at the conference room of the Bangladesh Network for Tobacco Tax Policy (BNTTP) in the capital’s Gulshan on Sunday.

The discussion, titled “Increasing Revenue and Reducing Use Through Strengthening Tobacco Control Laws,” was jointly organised by the Bureau of Economic Research (BER) of Dhaka University and BNTTP.

Speakers noted that tobacco companies have been claiming that strengthening tobacco control laws would reduce government revenue. But data from the National Board of Revenue (NBR) contradicts this claim.

When the Tobacco Control Act was passed in 2005, the revenue from tobacco that year was Tk2,888 crore. In the following fiscal year, 2005-06, the revenue increased to Tk3,351 crore. When the law was amended in 2013, the revenue from tobacco reached Tk10,170 crore, rising to Tk12,556 crore in the 2013-14 fiscal year. By the 2022–23 fiscal year, total revenue from the tobacco sector had soared to Tk32,823 crore.

Additionally, the speakers addressed claims from tobacco companies that employment would be adversely affected by tobacco control laws.

According to NBR data, only 46,000 workers are employed in the tobacco industry, while two multinational cigarette companies, British American Tobacco Bangladesh (BATB) and Japan Tobacco International (JTI), control nearly 90% of the market. Reports from these companies indicate that their total employee count is just 1,769 (1,669 from BATB and about 100 from JTI). Consequently, claims that seven million people would lose their jobs due to tobacco control measures are misleading.