African Cigarette Prices 2016-2022

For this project, the Research Unit on the Economics of Excisable Products organised for University of Cape Town students from different African countries to visit retail outlets and street vendors in their countries, where cigarettes were sold, and obtained permission to take photographs of cigarette packages using their cellphones.

Fieldworkers working in the same areas were put in contact to avoid duplication of effort. As such, it is reasonable to assume that duplication was largely avoided and that a store being interviewed twice in one round occured quite rarely if at all. Students were somewhat self-governing in their choice of areas to visit and stores from which to gather data. How the student groups covering an area divided up that area has not been well documented. As such, there may be geographic bias, for example against poorer areas that are more difficult to interview. This also means that a given interviewer might repeat whatever bias/mistakes they tend to make over all the rounds (if they remained on the project) making any bias hard to detect. In some cases the same store (retailer/spaza shop/street vendor) was interviewed in more than one round of data collection.