Light, Moderate, and Heavy Drinking

Abstract

Most countries around the world regulate alcohol in some form or another. Taxation is a popular form of regulation, but governments use many different approaches including prohibiting sales to minors, minimum purchase prices, and restrictions on days and hours of sales. Knowing how these policies affect the demand for alcohol is necessary for setting optimal policies. A common feature of most of the existing studies on alcohol policies is that they evaluate the effectiveness of the policy at the mean level of consumption. However, setting alcohol taxes or other regulations based on mean consumption may not produce desirable results given that low levels of consumption have different health and consumer utility considerations than higher levels. The purpose of this chapter is to review

Alcohol Control Policy in Europe: Overview and Exemplary Countries

“…It has become customary in the field to distinguish 10 broad categories and areas of policies based on the already mentioned WHO Global Strategy to Reduce the Harmful Use of Alcohol [9]: leadership, awareness, and commitment (usually measured via national alcohol plans); health services response; community action; drinking and driving policies and countermeasures; regulating availability of alcoholic beverages; regulating marketing of alcoholic beverages; pricing policies; reducing the negative consequences of drinking and alcohol intoxication; reducing the public health impact of illicit alcohol and informally produced alcohol; and monitoring and surveillance (for underlying principles in formulating policies, see [20]). Empirically, the so-called "best buys" of the WHO ( [21], which comprise increases in price for alcoholic beverages via taxation or other pricing policies, reduction of availability of alcoholic beverages, and bans on advertising and marketing) have been found to be the most effective and cost-effective alcohol policies to reduce health burden [17,22], albeit with different timeframes of impact (taxation and availability tend to include immediate effects on consumption and harm following implementation: [23][24][25]). The three "best buys" have been highlighted in the upper left-hand box of Figure 1.…”

Demand for Alcohol Consumption in Russia and Its Implication for Mortality

“…The second equation states the relationship between the Emax function and the choice-specific value functions: When I put a it = 0 , and a it = 1 in the equation, I have the moment condition on V i (0, s it ) : LEMMA: let z it be a state variable that enters both in π it (1) and in π it (0) :…”

“…These steps are similar to the standard 2SLS regression procedure. 20 The expected utilities of myopic consumer are as follows: E e −i u it (0) = 0 and E e −i u it (1) (1) . Notes: Table 5 shows the distribution of deaths and death causes for males from different age cohorts.…”

“…form the system of moments that I estimate in the next section. The first step of the estimation procedure resembles the first step in the estimation of the myopic model: I obtain estimates of beliefs (choice probabilities) ˆ σ it (0) and ˆ σ it (1) .…”

How To Design Excise Taxes on Alcoholic Beverages

“…16 Pursuing multiple policy goals demand multiple and appropriately targeted policy instruments. Markowitz and Ding (2020) point out that tax policy cannot on its own modify heavy drinkers' behavior and that policies such as minimum unit pricing could be effective tools, since they can target the cost of the cheapest alcoholic beverages that the heaviest drinkers favor, without penalizing light or moderate drinkers (Holmes and others 2014;Sharma, Etilé, and Sinha 2016;Calcott 2019). Other complementary regulatory policies include adjusting the legal drinking age, limiting alcoholic beverage sales days and 16 Arguments against high taxes on alcoholic beverages often suggest that higher prices resulting from tax increases will push the poorest drinkers to consume illicit and potentially dangerous alcohol (Babor and others 2015).…”