World Health Organization
In 1999, Poland was one of the first countries to carry out the Global Youth Tobacco Survey (GYTS), supported by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and World Health Organization, a standardized school-based survey of teenage smoking behavior, attitudes and knowledge. This report presents background information on smoking and tobacco control policies in Poland, and simple descriptive statistics of the GYTS survey data. It focuses on the relationship between smoking behavior, cigarette prices, and other factors that can be affected by policies intended to reduce smoking in order to reduce the associated burden of disease and
premature death. Multiple regressions explore the factors that affect the decision to smoke, and the number of cigarettes that current smokers report smoking each month, and find that availability of pocket money, age, gender, living in a large town, advertising, counter-advertising and disease-specific information on the effects of smoking all appear to be statistically significant. The analysis does not include the data needed to estimate price elasticity, but the survey suggests clearly that higher cigarette taxes that raise real prices and certain tobacco
control policies can reduce cigarette demand among teenage students in Poland.