Consumer Tobacco Product Choices in China: The Impact of a Ban on Flavored E-cigarettes

A growing body of economic research explores the impacts of U.S. e-cigarette regulations on consumer tobacco choices, but less is known about e-cigarette regulation in China, the world’s largest tobacco market. We study China’s ban of flavored e-cigarettes. The ban of all flavors in e-cigarettes other than tobacco was part of a comprehensive package of regulatory policies adopted in 2022. We collected stated preference data through two discrete choice experiments conducted in 2021 and 2023, with about 600 subjects each. All subjects were adult current smokers. In the experiments, subjects made hypothetical choices between cigarettes, e-cigarettes, and quitting. Product prices and the attributes of e-cigarettes were experimentally varied, allowing us to identify the impact of flavor availability on stated preferences. We use the data to estimate conditional logit models and to predict the impact of the flavor ban and other policies. The empirical results suggest that a ban of flavored e-cigarettes decreases stated preferences for e-cigarettes but also has the unintended consequence to increase stated preferences for cigarettes. Despite the predicted decrease in e-cigarette choices, the predicted choice share of flavored e-cigarettes when they are illegal but loosely enforced is 53% of the predicted share when legal. This large illegal share is consistent with anecdotal evidence and with the evidence from our 2023 background survey that flavored e-cigarettes remain popular after the ban although fewer vapers reported getting their e-cigarettes from specialty or general retailers.