2.1 Production and trade data as a basis for estimating tobacco consumption

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Data on quantities of tobacco products manufactured in Australia are available electronically back to 1957.5 Various ABS publications have also included statistics on exports and imports of products including tobacco—see ABS publication set 54,34 but historical data on tobacco exports and imports have not ever been compiled into a single document or time-series dataset.

2.1.1 Tobacco products manufactured in Australia

Table 2.1 shows the volume of total tobacco products produced in Australia since 1957.

Data for selected years are plotted in Figure 2.1.

The total weight of tobacco products manufactured in Australia has clearly declined substantially since it peaked at 33,300 metric tonnes in 1975.

Publication of data on production of cigarettes and other tobacco products was discontinued by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2004.

2.1.2 Manufactured tobacco products, adjusted for imports and exports

As noted above, data on manufactured tobacco products is of limited usefulness in estimating consumption because they include tobacco products produced for export and do not include tobacco products imported into Australia.

In February 2003 the Tobacco Free Initiative of the World Health Organization released a discussion paper on trends in tobacco use that did include estimates of such exports and imports. The analysis covered several dozen countries including Australia for the years 1970 to 2000.35 These estimates were based on data from a combination of official trade statistics and data collected by research agencies in surveys of tobacco companies. The Australian data on numbers of cigarettes produced came from the United States Department of Agriculture from 1970 to 1989, and then from (private sector) market research agency, ERC International Plc.31 [4] Data on quantities of cigarettes imported and exported came from databases compiled by the United Nations.36, 37 Estimates for Australia are included in Table 2.2.[5]

Using these data sets, it would seem that the total number of cigarettes consumed in Australia peaked in 1981, increased slightly over the early 1990s and declined by around one third between 1990 and 2000.

Euromonitor has performed a similar analysis for the following five years32, but it unlikely that its estimation methods were identical to those used by Guindon and Boisclair.

2.1.3 Manufactured and imported tobacco products per capita

To take account of increases in population over this 30-year period, Guindon and Boisclair's report for the World Health Organization also included estimates of per capita consumption. Per capita consumption is calculated using the number of people 15 years and over.[6] The figures included in the WHO study and reproduced here in Figure 2.2 are three-year running averages based on consumption in the listed and previous two years.

These data suggest that consumption of cigarettes has declined significantly since 1970, with almost a 50% reduction in the estimated number of cigarettes consumed per capita between 1980 (at which time the average per capita cigarette consumption for the previous three years had peaked at 3215 cigarettes) and 2000 (by which time average per capita consumption for the previous three years had reduced to 1708 cigarettes per person 15 years and older).