Over the past three decades, economists and others have devoted considerable effort to assessing the impact of alcoholic-beverage taxes and prices on alcohol consumption and its related adverse consequences. Federal and State excise taxes have increased only rarely and, when adjusted for inflation, have declined significantly over the years, as have overall prices for alcoholic beverages. Likewise, price increases can help reduce the risk for adverse consequences of alcohol consumption and abuse, including drinking and driving, alcohol-involved crimes, liver cirrhosis and other alcohol-related mortality, risky sexual behavior and its consequences, and poor school performance among youth. All of these findings indicate that increases in alcoholic-beverage taxes could be a highly effective option for reducing alcohol abuse and its consequences.
Download or order the free 20-page booklet, “Rethinking Drinking: Alcohol & Your Health”.
These strategies can help communities create social and physical environments that encourage drinking less alcohol. Use of these strategies can reduce binge drinking and related outcomes, such as motor vehicle crashes, injuries, violence, and sexually transmitted infections. Given the limited comparability of cost studies and can you drink alcohol while taking levaquin the implications discussed above, we suggest that funding for future cost-of-illness studies should be tied to adhering to methodological standards, such as imputing cost categories to achieve better comparability between studies [13, 14]. Such an approach would not only further facilitate better comparability between countries but would also allow for benchmarking between countries, which is one of the major methodologies used to improve health care systems (e.g. Bennett et al. [56] for the area of non-communicable disease). It would also take away one of the major and repeated criticisms of cost studies [55], which we have addressed in this contribution.
Health risks of alcohol use
In summary, non–tax-related State regulations that may directly or indirectly affect alcohol prices, drinking, and its consequences have been eroded in recent years, in part because of limited empirical evidence on their impact. The resulting further relaxation of these types of State regulations can contribute substantially to additional reductions in the real prices of alcoholic beverages, increased drinking, and greater alcohol-related harm. Studies addressing these issues are warranted and will greatly enhance understanding of the impact of changes in these policies on prices of alcoholic beverages. In recent years, some large alcoholic-beverage retailers have filed a couple of lawsuits against these non–tax-related State regulations over their perceived anticompetitive effects. For example, in Maryland, a large regional retailer has challenged the State’s ban on quantity discounts for wine and spirits at the wholesale level and the related price post-and-hold requirements (TFWS vs. Schaefer et al.) (Chaloupka 2010). In both cases, the States have adopted a defense based on the 21st Amendment to oppose these legal challenges, arguing that the regulations were consistent with the State public health interests by reducing excessive drinking.
Effects of Prices on Consequences of Alcohol Abuse
This population is of particular relevance because they exhibit relatively high levels of binge drinking and of alcohol-related problems; moreover, there seems to be great potential for using tax and price policies to prevent underage drinking. Using data from early waves of National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys, Grossman and colleagues (1987) and Coate and Grossman (1988) were the first to examine the impact of price on alcohol use among adolescents. These investigators found that price increases led to larger reductions in the fractions of heavy and fairly heavy adolescent drinkers than in the fraction of light drinkers.
This study not only summarized the total economic costs of alcohol consumption but also systematically quantified the contribution of various key cost components. Furthermore, this study is the first to overcome the limitations of previous reviews (e.g. Rehm et al. and Thavorncharoensap [8, 9]) related to methodological differences in cost estimation, thus eliminating a key barrier to compare costs across studies and countries. Alcohol use has been identified as a major risk factor for burden of disease [1–3], leading to the introduction of reduction goals in major UN and other international frameworks, such as the Sustainable Development Goals [4, 5]. However, alcohol consumption differs from many other risk factors, as attributable health burden is not restricted to the drinker alone but also extends to others, including those who have abstained from alcohol during their lifetime (e.g. via drunk driving or maternal alcohol consumption [6]).
Pogue and Sgontz (1989) showed that the “best-guess” estimate based on their model was 51 percent of the net price of the beverage (i.e., price excluding tax), whereas Kenkel (1996) estimated the optimal tax should be around 106 percent of the net price. Two other studies (Manning et al. 1989; Saffer and Chaloupka 1994) suggested that the excise tax rates during their study period would have had to be doubled to reach the optimal level. Given that State and Federal taxes generally have not kept pace with inflation since these studies were done (see figures 1 and and2),2), the “optimal” tax likely would have to be even higher today. In addition to tax-related polices, several other regulations also may directly or indirectly affect the prices of alcoholic beverages. These options include, but are not limited to, regulations on wholesale and retail distribution, bans on price-related promotions, and (targeted) minimum-pricing policies.
- Using CDC data on the average life expectancy in each state, we then found the number of drinks consumed over a lifetime on average.
- While these estimates overlap with our figures after adjustment for underreporting of omitted cost components, our unadjusted estimates are well below previous findings.
- These options include, but are not limited to, regulations on wholesale and retail distribution, bans on price-related promotions, and (targeted) minimum-pricing policies.
- Going out for drinks is part of many people’s social lives, young and old, but it can potentially develop into a costly problem in multiple ways.
There are also financial downsides to regular drinking, especially if one has a habit of drinking frequently and/or in large quantities. We decided to take a closer look at how United States cities compare when it comes to drinking habits and how to flush alcohol out of your system quickly the cost of these over a lifetime. To do so, we first looked at City-Data for the number of drinks each city’s inhabitants drink in a week on average. Using CDC data on the average life expectancy in each state, we then found the number of drinks consumed over a lifetime on average. Finally, we used Expatistan to find the average cost of alcoholic drinks in each city in order to determine the cost of drinking over various periods of time, including a full lifetime (age 21 and up).
Several studies have explored the effects of prices of alcoholic beverages on schooling, using both extensive (i.e., education attainment) and intensive (i.e., performance in school) measures. Two analyses using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth have shown that higher alcohol taxes led to increases in high-school graduation and post–high-school education attainment (Cook and Moore 1993b; Yamada et al. 1996). Most studies in this field have used fatal or nonfatal motor-vehicle crashes as a proxy for drinking and driving, because alcohol frequently is involved in these crashes.
In fact, our findings suggest that current cost estimates are largely unrelated to the underlying alcohol exposure involved, and rather are driven by differences in methodology or by country-specific factors, rendering cross-country comparisons rather meaningless. Lastly, we examined the link of the two cost indicators with the annual amount of pure alcohol intake (in litres) per capita and per drinker as two different indicators for population alcohol exposure as a proxy for the causal driver for incurred costs (for total, direct, and indirect costs). 4 (see ESM 1), alcohol exposure was not clearly linked to both cost indicators, suggesting other unobserved factors to be more relevant for incurred costs than alcohol exposure itself. However, numerous studies over the last two decades using a variety of econometric and statistical methods and different types of data have confirmed that higher prices substantially can reduce alcohol use (and abuse) and related adverse consequences even among heavier drinkers. Second, we found no clear link of alcohol exposure indicators to total costs; however, the relationship between alcohol exposure and adverse outcomes is more complex than one might initially assume.
Online tools such as an alcohol spending calculator can be helpful in seeing how much you may be spending by drinking daily. For example, if you drink 7 days a week and 5-6 beers a day at around $24 for a 12 pack of domestic beer, you’d be spending around $120 on beer alone in a week. Or $480 a month and $5,760 a year—which would not even account for the times you go out and highwatch online meetings drink at bars and restaurants. It may also begin to affect children as they may experience neglect or physical or emotional abuse from a parent struggling with alcoholism. This can range from missed events, such as soccer games or birthday parties, to verbal or physical violence at home. Family members dealing with alcoholism may also be less fully present in their day-to-day due to frequent hangovers or other adverse effects that may cause them to disengage.
Second, we summarized how many of the possible cost categories at this level were considered in each study, weighted by the relative contribution of each category (calculated in the first step). By repeating this procedure, we accounted for the inclusion of all relevant cost categories at each level for each study. Several studies have addressed the effects of alcohol prices on the drinking behaviors of youths and young adults.
These investigators failed to detect a significant relationship between tax rates and drinking-and-driving rates. Likewise, Dee (1999) and Young and Likens (2000) found that there was little relationship between beer taxes and motor-vehicle fatalities, and the significance of the relationship was very sensitive to the specification of regression models. As one explanation for these inconsistencies, Mast and colleagues (1999) argued that the minimum legal drinking ages had been higher in the later years of data collection, which means that beer taxes had become a smaller part of the “full price” of teen drinking. Another potential explanation comes from the distinction between alcohol-related and non–alcohol-related traffic fatalities.
Lascia un commento