Oz sales fail to prove plain cigarette packs work

No hard retail evidence has emerged in Australia to show that the introduction of plain packaging for cigarettes is worth copying by other countries.

It is more than a year since Australia became the first country in the world to introduce plain packs, but available supermarket data is inconclusive.

Cigarette sales in Australian supermarkets, which account for a large portion of the market, shrank 0.9% overall by volume in 2013, according to the latest data available from Retail World, but there is no clear link to the plain packaging laws.