Introduction

The last thirty-five years have witnessed some extraordinary changes in the world tobacco industry. For example, the expansion abroad of US cigarette companies (which had been domestically oriented from 1911 to 1952) first led to the break-down of forty years of international co-operation among the major producers (a de facto cartel) in the 1960s and 1970s and, then, to the re-establishment of global ‘equilibrium’ in recent years. This, in turn, signified the emergence of a truly global, highly concentrated transnational cigarette industry.

Likewise other changes have had considerable impact on the industry. Medical research in the last three decades has increasingly revealed the lethal side of the industry, implicating smoking with a wide variety of illnesses, usually terminal: lung, mouth, throat and bladder cancers, emphysema, cardiovascular diseases and so forth (USDHEW, 1979). The development of the smoking and health issue in all the industrialised nations has caused stagnating and even declining cigarette sales in those nations, thus leading to a shift in growth to LDCs where, for a variety of reasons, the public health issue is much less salient. The major cigarette firms have therefore turned to LDC markets for future growth.