The Triumph and Tragedy of Tobacco Control: A Tale of Nine Nations

The use of law and policy to limit tobacco consumption illustrates one of the greatest triumphs of public health in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as well as one of its most fundamental failures. Overall decreases in tobacco consumption throughout the developed world represent millions of saved lives and unquantifiable suffering averted. Yet those benefits have not been equally distributed. The poor and the undereducated have enjoyed fewer of the gains. In this review, we build on existing tobacco control scholarship and expand it both conceptually and comparatively. Our focus is the social gradient of smoking both within and across borders and how policy makers have been most effective in limiting smoking prevalence among the more privileged segments of society. To illustrate that point, we reference a range of literature on tobacco taxation, advertising, and public smoking in five economically advanced democracies—France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States—and four less developed nations—India, China, Brazil, and South Africa—that together comprise 40% of the world’s population

Families in Southeast and South Asia

Southeast and South Asia are home to one-third of the world’s population. Their great economic and cultural diversities make generalization about family patterns and trends hazardous. We review literature on trends in fertility, marriage, divorce, and living arrangements in the past half century. Explanations focus on structural and ideological changes related to socioeconomic development, cultural factors including kinship system, religion and ethnicity, and public policies. While the impact of rapid modernization and related ideational changes are evident, there are also changes, or lack thereof, that cannot be explained by development and may be attributable to historical and cultural factors that have shaped family norms in the region. The following trends are evident: (1) declining fertility and rising age at marriage, although teenage and arranged marriages remain common in South Asia, (2) a majority of elderly continue to live with or are supported by their children, (3) divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing remain relatively rare