Latvia ranks third in the European Union for its proportion of daily smokers in the population at 22.1%. The data is from 2019.
Among men, the share of daily smokers ranged from 5.9 % in Sweden, 11.7 % in Denmark and Luxembourg and 12.1 % in Finland to 37.6 % in Bulgaria and 34.4 in Latvia, while among women, the share ranged from 6.8 % in Sweden to 20.7 % in Bulgaria. Only 12.1% of Latvian women are daily smokers.
Turning to the highest shares, among men aged 35–54 years in Bulgaria and aged 45–54 years in Latvia, more than 45 % were daily smokers. In Latvia, men aged 75 years and over were 9 times as likely to be daily smokers as women in the same age group.
Denmark and Sweden were the only Member States where the share of daily smokers was higher among women than among men, although the differences in the shares were quite small, particularly in Denmark. The largest gender differences, in percentage point terms, were in Romania and Latvia, where the shares of daily smokers among men were 23.1 and 22.3 percentage points respectively above the shares recorded among women.
