Editor’s Note: See also Pakistan Adopts Anti-Cigarette Smuggling Strategy: Lowering Tobacco Taxes.
From: American Enterprise Institute
Omar Lohdra, 31, makes his living selling cigarettes from his mobile kiosk. He sells all types of cigarettes — legal products; locally produced, duty-not-paid cigarettes (DNP); and a few products smuggled in from overseas. The main imports are called illicit whites, legally made in places like Dubai and Korea, but then smuggled into Pakistan where they have no legal market.
Stack of cigarette packs with health warnings displayed in a showcase of a kiosk along a street in Karachi, Pakistan May 5, 2018. REUTERS/Akhtar Soomro
His richer clients buy either the illicit whites or the local main brands, while the local DNP products are the most popular with poorer people. Although in 2016 and 2017 he tells me that DNP products became his best sellers. The reason was because of the tax policies of the Pakistan government, further discussed in my paper published today.
