Tourist floods, GDP rockets, the government intervenes: smoking ordinance and its implementation

ABSTRACT

The first smoking regulation in Macau was marked in 1983. Due to the rising annual tourist arrival to around 30 million, a new smoking ordinance was implemented in 2012 and underwent transitions in 2013 and 2016, with the most current one in 2018, which heads to a full smoking ban. Under the intensive pace of implementation, the government and business segments have expressed controversial views on the impacts to tourists. More insight is required about the smoking behavior of tourists, which is still an under-explored area in contemporary researches. The current research has constructed a structural equation model based on an extension of the Theory of Planned Behavior that consists of the five variables, attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavior control, past behavior and moral norms. It is found that attitude and past behavior of tourists imposed the strongest positive correlations with their smoking intention, whilst past behavior and moral norms can mediate the effect of attitudes and perceived behavior control on smoking intention.

KEYWORDS:

• Gaming
• smoking
• smoking behavior
• smoking ordinance
• theory of planned behavior
• tourist

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.