WHO Report on the Global Tobacco Epidemic 2023

It is the ninth edition of the World Health Organization's biennial checkup on tobacco control, published 31 July 2023 under the subtitle Protect people from tobacco smoke. The report grades every Member State against the six MPOWER measures - Monitor tobacco use and prevention policies, Protect people from tobacco smoke, Offer help to quit, Warn about the dangers of tobacco, Enforce bans on advertising, promotion and sponsorship, and Raise taxes - each scored on a four-level achievement scale or marked no data. The 2023 edition's headline: smoke-free legislation now covers roughly a third of the world's population, up from almost nobody when the series began in 2008.

The PDF is the presentation layer. The analytical layer is the structured country-year table underneath it, maintained in the WHO Global Health Observatory as the Tobacco control: MPOWER indicator group - 29 indicators spanning policy scores and survey-based prevalence. That table is what Datadory delivers as rows, and this page documents it. In Datadory's catalog of 1,744 datasets across 159 viable industries, this record scores 9/10 for quality, and it anchors the policy half of the tobacco data hub: where survey datasets tell you how many people smoke, MPOWER tells you what governments have done about it.

Three rows carry most of what you need to judge fit - one prevalence observation, two policy scores:

# one row = indicator x country x year x dimension
IndicatorCode   : TOBACCO_MPOWER_OVERVIEW
SpatialDim      : SDN          # ISO-3 country code
ParentLocation  : Eastern Mediterranean   # WHO region
TimeDim         : 2022
Dim1            : <measure member, e.g. TOBACCO_INDICATOR_P_Group>
Value           : 4            # highest achievement level on that measure

IndicatorCode   : TOBACCO_MPOWER_OVERVIEW
SpatialDim      : FJI
ParentLocation  : Western Pacific
TimeDim         : 2008         # baseline-era observation
Dim1            : <measure member>
Value           : 3

IndicatorCode   : TOBACCO_MPOWER_M1_TOBACCOUSESMOKING
SpatialDim      : MAR
ParentLocation  : Eastern Mediterranean
TimeDim         : 2024         # latest Monitor-cycle estimate
Value           : National     # survey scope marker on prevalence rows

Reading them: the same schema carries both halves of the story. Policy rows resolve to an integer score of 1-4 - Fiji at level 3 in 2008 and Sudan at level 4 in 2022 are the kind of cells that stack into a fifteen-year legislative timeline without any reshaping. Prevalence rows carry their survey scope instead of a score, which is why Dim1 exists as its own field rather than being flattened into the value column. Every row arrives with country, region and year attached, so the panel pivots straight into country-year form. Your sample returns this exact schema cut to the countries, measures and years you name; the schema in the sample is the schema that ships.

Eleven fields carry the structured table behind the report, each verified against the published column definitions. The spine is a four-key identity - IndicatorCode, SpatialDim, TimeDim, Dim1 - with the measurement landing in Value and its numeric twin NumericValue. Low and High bracket the uncertainty interval on prevalence estimates, so a confidence band rides along on the rows that need it instead of living in a separate file. Comments preserves the source annotations attached to individual observations, and Date stamps when each record was last revised - useful when you snapshot history yourself and want to know whether a cell moved.

Additional fields on request: the full 29-indicator vocabulary inside Dim1, the code-list tables mapping indicator codes to plain-language labels, and derived views such as measure-score trajectories per country or prevalence-versus-policy joins across sources are mapped against live records when your sample is cut rather than asserted here.

• Geo: all WHO Member States - roughly 194 countries - plus regional aggregates across the six WHO regions (AFR, AMR, SEAR, EUR, EMR, WPR). The underlying code list carries 234 country entries, so small territories and non-member observations survive alongside the big markets.
• Temporal: the report series itself runs 2008-present, biennial editions with the 2023 edition published 31 July 2023. The structured observations beneath it span roughly 2007 through the latest reporting period, with Monitor-cycle prevalence estimates extending past the print edition - Morocco's smoking estimate above is dated 2024.
• Granularity: one observation per country-year per MPOWER measure, policy measures scored 1-4 or marked no data. That grain is coarse by design: legislation changes slowly, and the dataset is built to show the slope of law, not the weather of enforcement.

Set against the wider Datadory catalog - where the average quality score across all 1,744 datasets is 7.81 - this slice scores 9/10, carried by complete field documentation and values graded by the organization that wrote the rubric.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

Name the countries, measures and years when you request the sample - the full Member State panel, or a slice cut to the markets your work actually touches. Policy scores move slowly enough that a daily refresh is generous; pair it hourly if you are joining it against faster feeds and want the join keys always current. The payload is compact enough to land anywhere: pushed to storage, served over an endpoint, or written directly into Snowflake, BigQuery or Redshift beside your sales and pricing tables. Cadence changes are a settings conversation, not a re-integration project, and every delivery ships with the field dictionary above unchanged plus validation rows.

A policy scorecard earns its keep in five specific jobs:

1. Regulatory and market-entry strategists. Six measures scored per country is the compliance map for any product decision touching tobacco or nicotine-adjacent categories - packaging rules, advertising bans, tax posture, read off one consistent rubric instead of fifty legal memos.
2. Public-health researchers and academics. The MPOWER framework is the citation standard for tobacco-control progress, and achievement levels joined to prevalence trends give you the dose-response setup: did the score rise before consumption fell?
3. Investors and quant researchers. Tax and advertising scores feed directly into volume-risk models for listed tobacco exposure - a Raise-taxes step change is a margin event, and the panel dates exactly when each country crossed each threshold.
4. Policy analysts and NGOs. Fifteen years of levels make 'this government has done nothing since 2010' a queryable claim rather than an argument, and the regional aggregates benchmark one jurisdiction against its neighbors.
5. Journalists. A WHO-graded score survives review the way a press release does not; every number traces to the assessment methodology the organization defends.

For the regulated-volume counterpart in the largest single market, US TTB tobacco statistics tracks American removals under excise law; for modeled disease burden attributable to smoking, IHME GHDx GBD 2019 smoking prevalence picks up where policy scores stop. Law, behavior and consequence - three datasets, three grains, one industry.

Market researchers and consultants get the citable regulatory backdrop for any market study touching tobacco - six graded measures per country is chapter-two material that reviewers do not relitigate. Investors and quants get dated policy thresholds to regress volumes and margins against, with uncertainty bounds on the prevalence side keeping the joins honest. Data scientists get a clean four-key panel: numeric values already split from their string forms, region codes attached, and a revision timestamp for point-in-time correctness. Journalists and academics get the original grading rather than someone else's chart of it. Start at the tobacco data hub, then read vs US TTB Tobacco Statistics for where global policy grading beats national excise volumes - and where it does not.

Provenance note — published by the World Health Organization, the ninth edition in a series running since 2008. Each edition assesses the six demand-reduction measures of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control and names a theme; the 2023 theme is secondhand smoke, hence Protect people from tobacco smoke.

Scoring note — achievement levels 1-4 grade the strength of the policy in place, not its enforcement outcomes. A country can hold a high score with weak implementation, which is precisely why analysts join these scores to consumption and prevalence data before drawing conclusions.

Completeness note — Datadory scores this record 9/10, and the field dictionary above maps the structured table fully. The full 29-indicator vocabulary and code-list tables ride under additional fields on request rather than being approximated here.

Where to go next — pair the policy ledger with the behavior it tries to bend: Our World in Data — Smoking for chart-ready prevalence and attributable-death series, World Bank tobacco smoking indicators API for modeled adult prevalence across economies, and the WHO Global Health Observatory tobacco collection for the wider GHO indicator family. The ranking at best tobacco datasets puts all of them in order.