For each country included in our project, this page presents figures of smoking prevalence rates by gender and birth cohort over time.

To construct these figures, we first identify members of the same sex who were born in different calendar periods. Then, we compute each cohorts’ smoking prevalence rate (by sex) over their whole life-course (weighted by sampling weights and corrected for smoking-related mortality).

The prevalence of smoking in each cohort generally follows a bell-shaped pattern over time, reflecting a common pattern of smoking initiation that occurs in a fairly narrow chronological window – during puberty and early adolescence – and a longer period that stretches over the decades of adulthood during which smokers quit (at a much lower annual rate). However, one can observe significant variation across countries, genders, cohorts and calendar years, both in the higher moments (standard deviation, skewness, kurtosis) of the distribution and in the peak smoking rate.  For example, older cohorts of men smoke more than women, but this difference decreases among younger cohorts. Click on each country below to access the respective smoking patterns. For notes and sources, click here.

Australia, Canada, China, Germany, (East Germany, West Germany)
Russia, Spain, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States

Here we intend to provide detailed time-varying information on economic factors that could have driven the smoking patterns presented above. Depending on the data availability for each country, we will plot time-series of cigarette taxes or prices, indicators of economic development and prosperity (e.g. GDP per capita, employment/unemployment rates, etc.), indicators of the dissemination of information on the health-risks of smoking, etc.

These time-series will not be meant to exhaust the set of possible influential economic factors, but rather to provoke thoughts about whether they or other factors matter.