The Impacts of Smoking Bans on Smoking in Korea

금연법 강화가 흡연에 미치는 영향

There is a growing concern about potential harmful effect of second-hand or environmental tobacco smoking. As a result, smoking bans in workplace become more prevalent worldwide. In Korea, workplace smoking ban policy become more restrictive in 2003 when National health enhancing law was amended. The new law requires all office buildings larger than 3,000 square meters (multi-purpose buildings larger than 2,000 square meters) should be smoke free. Therefore, a lot of indoor office became non smoking area. Previous studies in other counties often found contradicting answers for the effects of workplace smoking ban on smoking behavior. In addition, there was no study in Korea yet that examines the causal impacts of smoking ban on smoking behavior. The situation in Korea might be different from other countries. Using 2001 and 2005 Korea National Health and Nutrition surveys which are representative for population in Korea we try to examine the impacts of law change on current smoker and cigarettes smoked per day. The amended law impacted the whole country at the same time and there was a declining trend in smoking rate even before the legislation update. So, the challenge here is to tease out the true impact only. We compare indoor working occupations which are constrained by the law change with outdoor working occupations which are less impacted. Since the data has been collected before (2001) and after (2005) the law change for treated (indoor working occupations) and control (outdoor working occupations) groups we will use difference in difference method. We restrict our sample to working age (between 20 and 65) since these are the relevant population by the workplace smoking ban policy. We also restrict the sample to indoor occupations (executive or administrative and administrative support) and outdoor occupations (sales and low skilled worker) after dropping unemployed and someone working for military since it is not clear whether these occupations are treated group or control group. This classification was supported when we examined the answers for workplace smoking ban policy existing only in 2005 survey. Sixty eight percent of indoor occupations reported having an office smoking ban policy compared to forty percent of outdoor occupation answering workplace smoking ban policy. The estimated impacts on current smoker are 4.1 percentage point decline and cigarettes per day show statistically significant decline of 2.5 cigarettes per day. Taking into account consumption of average sixteen cigarettes per day among smokers it is sixteen percent decline in smoking rate which is substantial. We tested robustness using the same sample across two surveys and also using tobit model. Our results are robust against both concerns. It is possible that our measure of treated and control group have measurement error which will lead to attenuation bias. However, we are finding statistically significant impacts which might be a lower bound of the true estimates. The magnitude of our finding is not much different from previous finding of significant impacts. For cigarettes per day previous estimates varied from 1.37 to 3.9 and for current smoker it showed between 1%p and 7.8%p.

국내외적으로 간접흡연이나 환경 속 담배연기가 미칠 수 있는 해악에 대한 관심이 고조되고 있으며, 그 결과 작업공간 내 금연정책이 점차 늘어나고 있다. 한국에서도 작업공간 내 금연정책이 2003년 국민건강증진법 개정으로 훨씬 강화되었다. 본 논문에서는 2001년과 2005년에 이루어진 국민건강영양조사를 이용하여 강화된 금연정책이 흡연율과 일평균 흡연 개비 수에 미친 영향을 분석하고자 한다. 금연법강화가 실내 작업공간 위주로 이루어진 점에 착안하여 법 개정의 영향을 많이 받은 실내근무자 직업군과 영향을 비교적 덜 받는 실외근무자 직업군을 비교하였다. 추정 결과, 금연법 강화로 95% 수준에서 유의하게 흡연율은 4.1%p 감소하였고, 흡연자 중 일평균 흡연 개비는 2.5개비 줄어든 것으로 나타났다.