Tuyển tập báo cáo các nghiên cứu khoa học quốc tế ngành y học dành cho các bạn tham khảo đề tài: ‘A major lobbying effort to change and unify the excise structure in six Central American countries’: How British American Tobacco influenced tax and tariff rates in the Central American Common Market | Holden and Lee Globalization and Health 2011 7 15 http content 7 1 15 H2 globalization 7 AND HEALTH RESEARCH Open Access A major lobbying effort to change and unify the excise structure in six Central American countries How British American Tobacco influenced tax and tariff rates in the Central American Common Market Chris Holden1 2 and Kelley Lee2 Abstract Background Transnational tobacco companies TTCs may respond to processes of regional trade integration both by acting politically to influence policy and by reorganising their own operations. The Central American Common Market CACM was reinvigorated in the 1990s reflecting processes of regional trade liberalisation in Latin America and globally. This study aimed to ascertain how British American Tobacco BAT which dominated the markets of the CACM sought to influence policy towards it by member country governments and how the CACM process impacted upon BAT s operations. Methods The study analysed internal tobacco industry documents released as a result of litigation in the US and available from the online Legacy Tobacco Documents Library at http . Documents were retrieved by searching the BAT collection using key terms in an iterative process. Analysis was based on an interpretive approach involving a process of attempting to understand the meanings of individual documents and relating these to other documents in the set identifying the central themes of documents and clusters of documents contextualising the documentary data and choosing representative material in order to present findings. Results Utilising its multinational character BAT was able to act in a coordinated way across the member countries of the CACM to influence tariffs and taxes to its advantage. Documents demonstrate a high degree of access to governments and officials. The company conducted a coordinated and largely successful attempt to keep external tariff rates for cigarettes high and .
