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In Chapter 3, the author will problematise the youth smoking epidemic within SEA, in order to justify why the regional impacts of the tobacco trade on youths are worrisome. The author will present the major youth smoking trends in SEA, for the purpose of illustrating how the presence of tobacco products has adversely affected regional youths to a concerning degree. The author, next, will highlight the causes of the youth smoking epidemic, namely susceptibility and positive advertising. The author follows by emphasising the national and regional costs of youth smoking, by arguing how such a lifestyle results in negative consequences in relation to the delinquency itself. Lastly, the author will recommend policies for tobacco control that SEA governments should consider to contain the epidemic of youth smoking. It is noteworthy that all SEA governments have some degree of tobacco control policies in place. However, many lack the implementation of comprehensive national tobacco control strategic plans and tightened law enforcement endeavours to specifically target the problem of youth smoking. Therefore, the outputs of this chapter should contain scholarly values that are conducive to the betterment of policy-making.

The U.S. 2009 Tobacco Control Act opened the door for new antismoking policies by giving the Food and Drug Administration broad regulatory authority over the tobacco industry. We develop a behavioral welfare economics approach to conduct cost-benefit analysis of FDA tobacco regulations. We use a simple two-period model to develop expressions for the impact of tobacco control policies on social welfare. Our model includes: nudge and paternalistic regulations; an excise tax on cigarettes; internalities created by period 1 versus period 2 consumption; and externalities from cigarette consumption. Our analytical expressions show that in the presence of uncorrected internalities and externalities, a nudge or a tax to reduce cigarette consumption improves social welfare. In sharp contrast, a paternalistic regulation might either improve or worsen social welfare. Another important result is that the social welfare gains from new policies do not only depend on the size of the internalities and externalities, but also depend on the extent to which current policies already correct the problems. We link our analytical expressions to the graphical approach used in most previous studies and discuss the information needed to complete cost-benefit analysis of tobacco regulations. We use our model as a framework to reexamine the evidence base for strong conclusions about the size of the internalities, which is the key information needed.

We explore the simultaneous influence of activist organizations and corporations on institutional change. Focusing on protests, campaign contributions, and lobbyists as the strategies used by activist organizations and corporations to influence institutional change, we study the dynamics between movements and counter-movements and their influence on the probability of institutional change. In the context of the US tobacco industry, the results shed light on the effectiveness of these strategies and uncover potential moderators of this relationship. Overall, we demonstrate the simultaneous and asymmetric effects of activist organizations and corporations that use conspicuous and inconspicuous strategies to change institutions.

A dynamic oligopoly model of the cigarette industry is developed to study the responses of firms to various antismoking policies and to estimate the implications for the policy efficacy. The structural parameters are estimated using a combination of micro and macro level data and firms’ optimal price and advertising strategies are solved as a Markov Perfect Nash Equilibrium. The simulation results show that tobacco tax increase reduces both the overall smoking rate and the youth smoking rate, while advertising restrictions may increase the youth smoking rate. Firm’s responses strengthen the impact of antismoking policies in the short run.

This chapter examines the impact of cigarette prices, taxes, and tobacco control policies on youth and young adult smoking propensity and intensity in the U.S. during the years 1997–2001, a period characterized by significant changes in cigarette prices and tobacco control policies. Employing a fixed effects technique, we find a strong negative impact of cigarette prices and taxes on youth and young adult smoking prevalence and conditional demand. Moreover, we find purchase, use, and possession laws to be inversely related to youth and young adult smoking prevalence.

This chapter examines whether the European Union or the United States set the parameters in the field of consumer protection and environmental regulations. The analysis points out that there is no straightforward answer because leadership rotates or fluctuates depending on the extent to which societies and decision makers feel strongly about a particular issue. Examples are tobacco control and regulations with regards to genetically modified crops and food. The US identified the risks related to the wide availability of cigarettes before the EU, while the EU highlighted the risks related to the introduction of GM crops/products in the absence of similar American concerns. Both cultural and institutional developments account for this divergence. A unique combination of factors heightened the salience of anti-smoking measures in the US, while an equally distinctive matrix of developments highlighted the social, economic, health, and safety challenges of genetically modified organism (GMO). However, in spite of different constellations of institutional and cultural factors, the EU has embraced tobacco control and the American private sector is slightly more cautious about pushing GM crops onto the market.

This chapter shows the prevalence, trends and heterogeneity in maternal smoking around birth in the United Kingdom (UK), focussing on the war and post-war reconstruction period in which there exists surprisingly little systematic data on (maternal) smoking behaviours. Within this context, the authors highlight relevant events, the release of new information about the harms of smoking and changes in (government) policy aimed at reducing smoking prevalence. The authors show stark changes in smoking prevalence over a 30-year period, highlight the onset of the social gradient in smoking as well as genetic heterogeneities in smoking trends.

Existing literature argues that the expression of delinquency is common during childhood and especially adolescence. Here, the practice of delinquent behaviours increases the risk of disrupting one’s trajectories of educational and labour market attainment. Delinquent youths, particularly those behaving delinquently severely, are prone to be undereducated, under- or unemployed, earning less, enjoying fewer employment welfare benefits and entitled to fewer job promotion opportunities. Given their sociological background, the author is interested in understanding how juvenile delinquency is socially constructed and reproduced. There are a variety of major key risk factors of the social construction of juvenile delinquency, including familial, or parental in particular, issues, the experience of any form of violence, the act of imitation, and psychological and emotional distress. In this book, the author will examine the socioeconomic, sociocultural and psychosocial factors that lead to the entrenched problems of youth delinquency. Per the United Nations, youth is defined as individuals aged from 15 to 24 years old. There are ample practical problems in adopting a legal definition to understand delinquency, because, for example, what is regarded as legal or not is often poorly defined and rather subjective. Also, legal definitions vary over time, barring a clear, standardised understanding of the word ‘delinquency’. In scholarly discourse, juvenile delinquency covers a multitude of sins, such as robbery, vandalism, violence, drug or alternative psychoactive substance use and the performance of some kinds of heterosexual or homosexual acts. While youth is widely interpreted as comprising individuals aged 24 years or below, the upper age limit for juvenile delinquency adopted by the English and American laws is much lower – under the age of 18 years. Given such contexts, in this book, the author primarily addresses youth/juvenile delinquent behaviours as relevant acts performed by individuals aged below 18 years. However, occasionally, the author presents survey data indicating youths’ expression of delinquency among respondents aged 24 years or below.

In this book, the author will provide reasoning on how Southeast Asian (SEA) governments, individually and collectively, have not taken an adequately aggressive, strict approach to regulating their policies against youth delinquency, prompting adolescents’ involvement in delinquent behaviours to be growing rampantly. The lack of appropriate legislative and law enforcement efforts results in significant individual and societal costs, jeopardising SEA’s pursuit of sustainable futures. Therefore, it is necessary to develop this book in order to analyse the causes and consequences of a variety of youth delinquent behaviours and its associated unequal power of relations, alongside expanding the insights of sociological inquiry into a current, ongoing phenomenon of inequalities. Policy recommendations are presented at the end of Chapters 3–5, allowing local policy-makers to evaluate the current policy development and seek possible policy amendments to efficiently and effectively cope with the notable, entrenched and multifaceted problems of youth delinquency. Outputs of this book, additionally, enable (under-)graduate students and relevant scholars and specialists focusing on SEA studies to understand the causes, effects, costs, and policy development and gaps with respect to the youth smoking epidemic, the youth drinking epidemic and youth delinquency of sexual misconduct.

One of the key highlights of this book is that the outputs suggest ways to attain more sustainable, equitable, liveable and inclusive futures in SEA other than the assessments of youth delinquency per se. In doing so, the author hopes to contribute scholarly to the understanding of how regional economic competitiveness, social cohesion and habitability can be sharpened when youth delinquency is addressed thoroughly and aptly. Moreover, when the author addresses youth delinquency, they identify how digitalisation and informationisation diversify the means for the SEA youths to gain access to tobacco products, alcohol goods, commercial sex clients and casual sex partners. Recommended policies in response to youth delinquency regionally, in part, target tightening the imposition of e-regulations by SEA governments to narrow any regulatory loopholes that relevant parties can instrumentalise on to earn lucrative profits at the expense of raising the rates of youth delinquency. In-depth analyses of both conventional and digitalised youth delinquency add further value to this book to readers’ understanding of the corresponding timely issues and recommended policy-making.

The author will, therefore, primarily explores the contexts of Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. Here Thailand and Malaysia are, currently, the only two regional upper-middle-income countries that share the same prospect of becoming high-income countries in the future. Indonesia, alternatively, has overtaken the Philippines as the biggest economic market and political powerhouse within the region. Therefore, compared to their less or least developed neighbouring counterparts, these countries are more prepared to develop sustainable, habitable and equitable futures while maintaining their Asian and global standings by raising economic and social competitiveness. Indonesia and Malaysia are among the two largest Muslim-majority countries in the globe. In the next chapters, the author will theorise how religious conformity deters local youths from expressing delinquency. Per Islamic laws, smoking, drinking and premature sex are prohibited. It will be interesting to explore whether religious deterrence helps prevent Indonesian and Malaysian youths from expressing delinquency. If not, the author will investigate what factors prompt local youths to behave delinquently, despite religious deterrence. Although these three countries are prioritised in the sociological discussion, the author will present some arguments and data with respect to the contexts of other SEA countries, such as the Philippines and Vietnam, to support their evaluation of youth delinquency regionwide.