Tobacco Control Policymaking in Developing Regions

Abstract

In this chapter we focus on the developing regions: Asia Pacific (AP), Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and Sub-Sahara Africa (SSA). Tobacco policy in these regions generally exhibits two distinctive tendencies. First, in most cases, tobacco control policies and programmes were virtually non-existent as recently as the 1970s. Second, few developing countries have developed policy exclusively from domestic sources. Rather, it has developed mostly through policy transfer from developed countries; this process has culminated in the production of the 2003 WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) (Chapter 9). These points influence how we analyse tobacco control policy change in developing regions. We still focus on the five key explanatory factors, but in two different ways: as a means to explain limited policy change during most of the 20^th century and then to demonstrate how policy has changed more recently through transfer.