So you want to quit smoking: have you tried a mobile phone?

Abstract

Using spatially coded data on mobile phone coverage and panel data from 2100 households in 135 communities of the Philippines, we estimate the impact of mobile phone ownership on tobacco consumption. Purchasing a mobile phone leads to a 17.1% decrease in tobacco consumption per adult over the age of 15.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Charles Kenny and Mark Williams for fruitful discussions that led to this article. We thank Damien de Walque, Gillette Hall, Ben Olken and Melody Tulier for helpful comments. We also thank Bhuvan Bhatnagar, Andrew Parker, Camilla Holmemo, Arsenio Balisacan, Rosemarie Edillon, Sharon Piza and all the staff of APPC without whom the field work would have been impossible. Shiel Velarde and Siobhan Murray provided extremely valuable help accessing and using the GIS data sets. We are grateful to the Philippines Department of Social Welfare and Development for allowing us to use the data. Financial support from the Trust Fund for Environmentally and Socially Sustainable Development is gratefully acknowledged. All remaining errors are ours. The findings, interpretations and conclusions expressed in this article are entirely those of the authors and should not be attributed in any manner to the World Bank, to its affiliated organizations or to members of its Board of Executive Directors or the countries they represent.

Notes

¹ http://www.who.int/tobacco/mpower/tobacco_facts/en/index.html (accessed 17 May 2008).

² http://www.who.int/entity/healthinfo/statistics/bodgbddeathdalyestimates.xls (accessed 28 July 2008).

³According to WHO (2008), the price of a pack of 20 sticks for the most popular brand in the Philippines is 25 PHP.

⁴The main results of the article are basically unchanged if we run our regressions with different age cut-off (e.g. 13 and 17). Results available upon request.

⁵For more information on the index, please see Labonne et al. (2007).