Smoking Behavior among Youth in a Developing Country: The Case of Indonesia

John Strauss, University of Southern California
Firman Witoelar, Yale University
Pungpond Rukumnuaykit, Mahidol University

This paper examines smoking behavior among youth using data from three waves of the Indonesia Family Life Survey (1993, 1997 and 2000). We show that youth smoking has been increasing in the 1990s in Indonesia. We study the socio-economic factors determining cigarette smoking participation and its intensity, plus cigarette expenditures. Our results show that parental education has significant negative effects on smoking participation and smoking intensity of male youth (15-19). While income as measured by per capita expenditure does not seem to have significant effect on smoking participation, it does seem to have significant, positive relationship with smoking intensity of adult male 20-59 years old. Our estimates of own price elasticities are quite sensitive to whether we estimate it using expenditure data, in which case it is more negative, though still price inelastic (-0.8), or using individual smoking data, in which case the elasticity is close to 0.