Role of Education in Cigarette Smoking: An Analysis of Malaysian Household Survey Data*

Abstract

Heckman's sample selection model is used to examine the role of education on household purchase decisions and expenditures of tobacco products in Malaysia. Results of the marginal effects of education, segmented by ethnic and gender groups, suggest that education decreases the probability, conditional levels and unconditional levels of tobacco expenditures amongst Malaysian households. Specifically, an additional year of education of the household head, irrespective of ethnic or gender considerations, decreases smoking probability by 1.5 percent. However, the negative effect of education seems to be higher for Chinese (US$1.07) than Malay (US$0.26) households in terms of conditional expenditures. Furthermore, education significantly decreases conditional tobacco expenditures within male‐headed households.

Smoking Stage Relations to Peer, School and Parental Factors among Secondary School Students in Kinta, Perak

“…One, school connectedness-taken as the belief by students that teachers and lecturers cared about their learning, about them as individuals and the students had sense of attachment to their school (Morgan et al, 1991;Blum et al, 2004); the other -school adjustment referring to school related outcomes (Harakeh et al, 2005) and in this study taken as adolescents' perceived ability to cope with their school work compared to their peers. Numerous studies have found an inverse association between school factors and adolescent smoking behavior (Morgan et al, 1991;Tan et al, 2009). Even though our study showed only weak associations between both the school factors and smoking stages, the never smokers in our study had higher school connectedness and school adjustment scores compared to the rest of the smoking stages.…”

Exploring Factors Influencing Smoking Behaviour in Malaysia

“…Better understanding of this topic may provide a clearer picture for the policy makers of the directions to design proper intervention strategies. To our knowledge, numerous studies have examined this issue in Malaysia (Siahpush et al, 2008;Lim et al, 2009;Tan et al, 2009;Al-Naggar and Saghir, 2011). However, they only focus on investigating the socio-demographic differences in smoking participation.…”

“…For instance, Tan et al (2009) use Malaysian Household Survey data and find that there are ethnic differences in households purchase decision of tobacco products. Similarly, Yen (2005) also observes that races may influence the propensity to smoke in US.…”

“…In Malaysia, smoking brings about approximately 20% of all deaths annually, which accounting for almost 10000 deaths in the region (Lim et al, 2009;Tan et al, 2009). On top of that, in 2006, estimated more than 15% of the total hospitalisations in the country are due to smoking related illnesses.…”

“…The recent report of Institute for Public Health (2008) illustrates that almost quarter (23%) of the total adult populations in Malaysia are smokers, and majority of them are males. In terms of economic burden, Malaysian government is spending more than RM 3 billion yearly on treating smoking related diseases such as lung cancer, cardiovascular diseases and chronic respiratory diseases (Tan et al, 2009).…”