Smoking by women in cross-country perspective

Abstract

This chapter compares patterns of smoking behavior across 10 countries for seven cohorts of women. The focus is on four measures of cohort-specific smoking behavior: the peak rate of smoking prevalence, the number of cigarettes smoked per day by the average smoker, the average age of smoking initiation of smokers, and the average quit age. These measures starkly expose that, along some dimensions, cross-country patterns of female smoking are converging over time, but some substantial differences remain in the youngest cohorts. To explore what factors might explain the observed variation, the chapter presents correlations among each cohort’s smoking prevalence rate in each country and year and selected economic and demographic factors in each country and year. This analysis highlights possible hypotheses that researchers might pursue and more formally test.