Neo-liberalism, Free Trade and Youth Smoking

Audience: Tobacco control professionals and academic researchres.

Key Points: Past studies of adult smoking at the cross national level have shown that Transnational Tobacco companies (TTC) have benefited from the implementation of neo-liberal policies, but there is no consensus on how and why neo-liberal policies impact rates of youth smoking in the developing world. Even though youth smoking is a serious and growing problem in the developing world, past studies that analyzed the Global Youth Tobacco Survey (GYTS) have focused on only a few nations, did not use Structural Equation modeling to examine the data and did not frame the issue from a macro-sociological perspective. This paper seeks to fill the gap in the literature with regards to the international and intra-national determinants of youth smoking in developing nations. I accomplish this by testing competing views of how neo-liberal policies, pro-smoking advertisements and political openness impact national rates of youth smoking in developing nations using structural equation modeling to examine direct and indirect effects of neo-liberal variables and measures of exposure to pro-smoking media material on data from the Global Youth Tobacco Survey.

Educational Experience: The results in this analysis reveal that political, economic openness and neo-liberal policies lead to higher levels of pro-smoking media exposure which is correlated with higher levels of youth smoking in the developing world.

Benefits: a clearer view of the complexity of both direct and indirect relationship between macro-sociological factors and youth smoking.