Changes in Prices After an Excise Tax to Sweetened Sugar Beverages Was Implemented in Mexico: Evidence from Urban Areas

M Arantxa Colchero, Juan Carlos Salgado, Mishel Unar-Munguía, Mariana Molina, Shuwen Ng and Juan Angel Rivera-Dommarco

PLOS ONE, 2015, vol. 10, issue 12, 1-11

Abstract: In 2014 an excise tax to non-alcoholic sweetened beverages (SSB) was implemented in Mexico. The objective of this paper is to study whether and to what degree these taxes passed-through onto SSB prices in urban areas overall and by region, type of beverage and package size. Prices were obtained from the National Institute of Statistics and Geography from 2011 to 2014. We applied a pre-post quasi-experimental approach using fixed effects models. In sensitivity analysis we applied other model specifications to test the robustness of the findings and we also present weighted estimations based on household purchases. The dependent variables are real prices of a specific beverage category; the main independent variables are dummies for each month of 2014, and the models adjust for time trends and seasonality. Results suggest that the SSB tax passed along to consumers for all SSBs and we found overshifting for the carbonated SSBs. A greater effect is seen among the small package sizes, and we see heterogeneous effects by region. Estimating the effect of the tax on prices is important to understand the potential effect on consumption.

Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (37)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0144408 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 44408&type=printable (application/pdf)

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:plo:pone00:0144408

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0144408

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().