Economic Effects of Smoke-Free Ordinances in Mississippi Communities

Audience: Smoke-free advocates and decision-makers will most likely benefit from this poster.

Key Points:

In order to provide a comparison for each of the Mississippi communities with comprehensive smoke-free ordinances and an optional tourism tax, we aggregated revenue data from the communities with the tourism tax but without smoke-free ordinances and calculated a comparison for each smoke-free community. We contrasted percent change in revenue in each of these smoke-free communities to the aggregated percent change in the comparison communities in Mississippi that did not have smoke-free ordinances. Aggregated pre- and post-ordinance tourism tax revenue data for control communities were extracted for the same period as each of the smoke-free communities, and provide a comparison for the same time period. For the communities with smoke-free ordinances as a whole, inflation-adjusted tourism tax revenue were 10.3% greater in the 12 months following the enactment of a smoke-free ordinance. Conversely, there was no meaningful change in tourism tax revenue in the aggregated control communities (-.1%). Thus there is no evidence that smoke-free ordinances harmed from the tourism tax.

Educational Experience: The poster and presenter will provide background on the need for objective economic measures to assess the impact of smoke-free ordinances, and then describe the methdology of using toursim tax and control communities.

Benefits: The audience will have a better understanding of the methods used to assess economic impact and of the lack of any negative impact of smoke-free ordinances in Mississippi.