Pavel Hait

Smoking: Impact on the State Budget and Its Fair Taxation Pavel Hait

Studies evaluating the mortality of smoking and its financial burden belong to the mainstream of current research of health economists. The author did such a study on the Czech Republic data. However, he decided to go deeper. His main motivation was to compute a fair excise tax on cigarettes. He defined ?fairness? as a situation in which there is no net redistribution of state budget funds between two groups of citizens: smokers and non-smokers. Smokers create benefits (for example, savings on pensions due to their earlier deaths) and costs (for instance, increased health care costs) for the state budget. He searched for a tax rate that would balance these costs and benefits. He hopes that the study will stir both academic and public debate about cigarette consumption and its financial impact.