Volume 160, July 2016, Pages 54–66
- a London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Social Policy, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom
- b International Centre for Health Economics, Management and Policy, HSE University, St Petersburg, Russian Federation
- Received 19 December 2015, Revised 26 April 2016, Accepted 4 May 2016, Available online 9 May 2016
Highlights
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- Life-course smoking histories established for Russia to examine the dynamics of smoking patterns over the past 7 decades.
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- Earlier literature may have over-stated the role of economic transition in promoting tobacco consumption in Russia.
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- Gender smoking rates have converged over time owing to both increases in female and decreases in male smoking.
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- For both genders educational gradient in smoking steepened over time.
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- Russian smoking fits the model of the tobacco epidemic and mirrors the patterns observed in Western high-income countries.
Abstract
While
a number of studies, based on cross-sectional data for Russia, have
documented strong increases in female smoking during the past two
decades, the analysis of longer-term trends in smoking prevalence is
hampered by the lack of representative data for the Soviet era. In this
paper we create life-course smoking histories based on retrospective
data from the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey of HSE (RLMS-HSE)
and the Global Adult Tobacco Survey (GATS) which allow us to examine the
dynamics of smoking patterns over the past 7 decades. We find that
smoking rates differ most strongly by gender within all cohorts, but
that this differential has decreased over time, driven by increases in
female smoking and more recently by decreases in smoking among men. For
both genders we observe that the education gradient has become steeper
over time, with smoking rates having increased at a higher rate among
those with the lowest educational attainment. These findings suggest
that the development of smoking in Russia mirrors that described in the
model of the tobacco epidemic and observed in Western high-income
countries.
Keywords
- Life-course smoking;
- Economic transition;
- Retrospective data;
- Model of the tobacco epidemic;
- Russia;
- Gender
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