Wow, that's surprising to me because of smoking alone. When I lived there briefly in the early 90s, it seemed like everyone smoked. I wonder if that's changed dramatically or is just drowned out by other metrics...
and begging of 2000s, my first job as programmer was in a small design company(<10 employees), people were smoking at the office while working, it really suck to come back home with smelling clothes, it wasn't until 2006 when it became forbidden to smoke at work and other public places like bars or restaurants (with some exceptions if they have special space for smokers and enough size).
Besides that, sun light is very healthy, we see all the time articles about vitamin D, I think the way of living of Italians and Spanish of being more in the outside because the good weather might influence too, hard to know for sure.
I'm Spanish and live here and I'd say people smoke a lot less than they used to after laws were passed a few years ago banning smoking from pretty much any indoor space that isn't residential. I know few people who smoke and those who do don't smoke _a lot_. French people on the other hand, pretty much every person I know, even here living in Barcelona, smokes like crazy.
This seems to have massively changed all over Europe. When I was a kid in the 90s you could go into bars that were foggy with smoke. TV characters would do it.
Nowadays it's generally not cool anymore, it's seen as a vice and people will sdmit so when they ask if it's okay.
The laws changed and smoking inside public spaces was all but abolished. There are still holdouts in the countries that passed these laws more recently but the trend is clear and it's acceleration.
I also noticed that one big factor that actually worked in discouraging teens from even starting is the "uncool" image built around smoking.
Unfortunately it look like the coolness factor is moving to electronic cigarettes and there's not much data to discourage the use yet.
What's going on with Luxembourg? 6330.9 cigarettes, per person, per year (which is over six times the US consumption). And, they're ranked still 11th on the Bloomberg list.
You are right about that, I lived in Trier, a German town next to the border to Luxembourg. A lot of people in the area went there just to fill their tanks (gas is around 20 cent less per liter) and stock up on cigarettes and coffee.
