ArmInfo.Increasing the price of tobacco by 45% will prevent about 88,000 premature deaths among those who quit and do not start smoking. Armenian Healthcare Minister Arsen Torosyan wrote about this in his Facebook page, presenting the results of a study that was conducted in April 2017 by Harvard University, the University of Washington and the World Bank.
The "Estimating the Distributional Impact of Increasing Taxes of Tobacco Products in Armenia". "The main results of the research are presented before the full text is published in Armenian," Torosyan wrote. The full version of the text in English is presented on the site https://goo.gl/SQxSWc
Arsen Torosyan promised soon to present the experience of other countries where the increase in the excise tax on tobacco led to an increase in income. According to the head of the Ministry of Healthcare, this will be the answer to those who claim the opposite.
To recall, at the last meeting of the government there was a heated controversy between the head of government, the Minister of Healthcare, the Deputy Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance. The head of the Ministry of Health care opposed the draft amendments to the current Tax Code due to the fact that he noted some changes in comparison with the option presented weeks earlier. In particular, as pointed out by Torosyan, in the version that was presented to members of the government, the excise tax on the so-called "heated tobacco" -IQOS was reduced from 8500 to 2 thousand drams. This, as the Minister of Healthcare stressed, is at odds with the previously announced idea of raising the excise tax on a number of goods in order to protect public health.