• Tobacco industry
• End game
• Economics

Could state-owned tobacco industries help take us towards the tobacco end-game? The thought that the tobacco industry be put to work to advance progressive tobacco control policies is usually anathema for tobacco control experts and advocates. After all, the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) is based on the premise that there is an irreconcilable conflict between the tobacco industry and public health. However, this is what Hogg et al1 ask us to consider in their recent paper on whether state-ownership of the tobacco industry is in fact a fundamental conflict of interest, or a ‘tremendous opportunity’ for tobacco control.

In their thought-provoking analysis, Hogg et al argue, first of all, that state-owned tobacco companies (SOTCs) are seriously under-analysed in the academic literature on the tobacco industry. They have a point: despite the fact that China National Tobacco Corporation (CNTC), for example, has a greater share—at 43%—of the global tobacco market than Philip Morris International (14%), British American Tobacco (12%), Japan Tobacco International (9%) and Imperial (5%) combined,2 Tobacco Control has published just three articles on CNTC, compared to around 70 on Philip Morris alone.1

Hogg et al propose three contrasting perspectives for assessing the strategic significance of state-ownership of tobacco companies to tobacco control. First, the ‘intrinsic conflict’ model, in which the tobacco industry—state-owned or not—is seen as having an irreconcilable conflict of interest with public health. Using this perspective, it is sometimes argued that SOTCs should be privatised, because the fundamental conflict of interest created by a government both owning and regulating the tobacco industry cannot otherwise …