BACKGROUND: Policy and price differences between countries can incentivize the movement of products across borders, but illicit trade is not a foregone conclusion. This analysis looks at whether sea and land border lengths are correlated with the illicit trade of cigarettes.
METHODS: The World Factbook was used for data on land borders and coastlines. There are 166 countries/territories with land borders and 199 with coastlines. One coastline (Canada) was an outlier with a length of 202,080km that was more than three times the next longest (54,716km; Indonesia). Illicit cigarette trade data is from Euromonitor’s Illicit Trade Penetration analysis for 2022. The land border analysis included 91 countries, coastline analysis included 81 countries (80 without Canada), and the combined border analysis was 97 countries (96 without Canada). Analysis was run with and without Canada and separately for land borders and coastlines.
RESULTS: Total border length ranged from 193km (Singapore) to 210,972km (Canada). The estimated size of the illicit cigarette trade in 2022 ranged from 0% (Japan) to 80.6% (Panama). The correlation between these two sets of data is -0.0024. When removing the outlier border length of Canada, the variation in total border length explained 0.82 percent of the variation in the estimated size of the illicit cigarette market. The variation in coastline (excluding Canada) still only explained 2.77 percent of the differences in the illicit cigarette markets. The variation in the length of land borders explained <0.001 percent of the variation in the illicit cigarette markets.
CONCLUSIONS: Border length alone is not correlated with illicit cigarette trade. Previous research has found that illicit trade is best mitigated by a secure supply chain and strong governance, which can include industry-independent tracking and tracing system and strengthening enforcement efforts. Future analysis will include variables such as border characteristics, governance strength and price differentials.