EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Price impact of taxes on sugary drinks in Brazil

Paula Pereda and Carolina Policarpo Garcia

Economics & Human Biology, 2020, vol. 39, issue C

Abstract: Sugary drink consumption is an important contributor to the current global epidemic of obesity. In recent years, 50 countries or jurisdictions have implemented taxes on sugary drinks as an instrument to discourage consumption. Against the tide, Brazil reduced taxes on these beverages in 2017 and 2018. However, a recent debate – raised by the federal government – has started over taxation of sugary and alcoholic beverages (sin taxes). The effectiveness of this policy will depend on how the taxes are transferred to prices. In this sense, this paper we aim to quantify the impacts of the tax reduction on prices of sugary drinks in Brazil, and therefore to contribute to the debate by calculating the pass-through of taxes to prices of these products in the Brazilian context. We analyze the Brazilian market using a panel data of products, by brand, collected by Euromonitor from 2013 to 2018. Our results suggest that the transfer of taxes to prices depends on the firm size and the type of product, with pass-through rates ranging from 15% to 124%.

Keywords: Tax incidence; Sugar-sweetened beverages; Difference-in-differences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D10 H22 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570677X20301684
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:ehbiol:v:39:y:2020:i:c:s1570677x20301684

DOI: 10.1016/j.ehb.2020.100898

Access Statistics for this article

Economics & Human Biology is currently edited by J. Komlos, Inas R Kelly and Joerg Baten

More articles in Economics & Human Biology from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:ehbiol:v:39:y:2020:i:c:s1570677x20301684