Home > Prices, taxes and alcohol use: a systematic umbrella review.

Guindon, G Emmanuel and Zhao, Kevin and Fatima, Tooba and Garasia, Sophiya and Quinn, Nicholas and Baskerville, N Bruce and Paraje, Guillermo (2022) Prices, taxes and alcohol use: a systematic umbrella review. Addiction, 117, (12), pp. 3004-3023. https://doi.org/10.1111/add.15966.

External website: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/a...

AIM
To measure the impact of taxes and prices on alcohol use with particular attention to the different context of rising alcohol consumption in low- and middle-income countries.

METHODS
Systematic review: we searched MEDLINE, Embase, EconLit and LILACS, grey literature, hand-searched five specialty journals and examined references of relevant studies. We considered all reviews that included studies that quantitatively examined the relationship between alcohol prices or taxes and alcohol use. At least two reviewers independently screened the articles and extracted the characteristics, methods and main results and assessed the quality of each included study. We identified 30 reviews.

RESULTS
There was overwhelming evidence that higher alcohol prices and taxes were associated with lower total alcohol consumption and that price responsiveness varied by beverage type. Total own-price elasticities of alcohol demand were consistently negative and substantial enough to be policy meaningful; total own-price elasticities for beer, wine and spirits were found to be approximately -0.3, -0.6 and -0.65. Reviews generally concluded that higher taxes and prices were associated with lower heavy episodic drinking and heavy drinking, although the magnitude of these associations was generally unclear. Reviews provided no evidence that alcohol price responsiveness differed by socioeconomic status, mixed and contradictory evidence with respect to age and sex and limited evidence that price responsiveness in low- and middle-income countries was approximately the same as in high-income countries.

CONCLUSIONS
Taxes are effective in reducing alcohol use. Moreover, increasing the price of alcohol by increasing taxes can also be expected to increase tax revenue, because the demand for alcohol is most certainly inelastic.


Item Type
Article
Publication Type
International, Open Access, Article
Drug Type
Alcohol
Intervention Type
Prevention, Harm reduction
Date
2022
Identification #
https://doi.org/10.1111/add.15966
Page Range
pp. 3004-3023
Publisher
Wiley-Blackwell
Volume
117
Number
12
EndNote

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