High vaping taxes ‘raise public health costs by encouraging smoking instead’

High taxes on vaping products end up encouraging people to smoke, a recently published US paper on the taxation of reduced-harm products has found.

This is because vaping and smoking products tend to be economic substitutes, not complements, at a market level, according to the report’s author James Prieger, an economist specialising in tobacco taxation. And that means that increasing taxes on one of the products will boost demand for the other.