Meeting the Global Health Challenge to Reduce Death and Disability from Alcohol, Tobacco, and Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Consumption with Corrective Taxes

Chris Lane and Vinayak Bhardwaj
Additional contact information
Chris Lane: Center for Global Development
Vinayak Bhardwaj: Johns Hopkins University

No 240, Policy Papers from Center for Global Development

Abstract: Behind the daily trauma of COVID-19 lies a larger and longer-lasting global health challenge resulting from the consumption of tobacco, alcohol, and sugar-sweetened beverages. Using a sample of 25 large advanced and emerging market economies accounting for three-quarters of global GDP, we show that about 60 million productive life years were lost every year in 2000, 2010, and 2019 from death and disability attributable to alcohol, tobacco, and diets high in sugar-sweetened beverages. Using the cost-of-illness framework, the economic value of these lost productive years in 2019 is approximately $2.1 trillion in our country sample (in 2017 purchasing power parity dollars [PPP$]). We show that over a 20-year period, a higher tax effort is associated with larger reductions in economic costs. We also show that total corrective taxes for all the products under investigation fall far short of the indirect costs of consumption in all countries. We conclude that all advanced economies and emerging markets could reap substantial macroeconomic benefits from better health by raising corrective taxes on alcohol and tobacco and by introducing corrective taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages.

Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2021-11-17
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cgdev.org/publication/meeting-global-h ... l&utm_campaign=repec

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cgd:ppaper:240

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Papers from Center for Global Development Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Publications Manager ().