Abstract
Smoking is a major concern in public health policy as it produces numerous adverse effects on health. Some of them, such as lung cancer or chronic bronchitis, are mainly attributable to tobacco use, whereas others are related partly to smoking — e.g. mouth cancer or atherosclerosis. The impact of these disorders is usually assessed by means of non-monetary indicators, for example the number of deaths or disabilities related to smoking, the frequency of work incapacity, or the number of potential life years lost as a consequence of smoking. There were 8,300 deaths — or one in six — and more than 16,000 individuals who became disabled due to smoking in 1995 in Switzerland. We estimated that approximately 50,000 years of potential life and more than 5 billion working days were lost. This data reveals the magnitude of the adverse outcomes of smoking, but does not provide a global picture of the burden placed on society. The aim of the present study was to estimate the economic and non-economic consequences of smoking1. By using monetary values one can summarise the numerous adverse effects expressed in a single figure: the social cost of tobacco consumption. In Switzerland, a study conducted by Leu and Schaub (1985) valued the economic costs of smoking for 1976.
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Priez, F., Jeanrenaud, C., Vitale, S., Frei, A. (1999). Social Cost of Smoking in Switzerland. In: Jeanrenaud, C., Soguel, N. (eds) Valuing the Cost of Smoking. Studies in Risk and Uncertainty, vol 13. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4415-5_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4415-5_9
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