ArticleHealth promotion and chronic disease prevention in Canada : research, policy and practice2020
How many alcohol-attributable deaths and hospital admissions could be prevented by alternative pricing and taxation policies? Modelling impacts on alcohol consumption, revenues and related harms in Canada.
Article in Health promotion and chronic disease prevention in Canada : research, policy and practice, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 26 citations in OpenAlex.
- Impact of minimum unit pricing on alcohol-related hospital outcomes: systematic review.BMJ open · 2023Pooled it
- Article
- Estimating the differential exposure of household groups to alcohol duty reforms in Great Britain.Journal of public health (Oxford, England) · 2025Article
- Article
- Alcohol-attributable mortality and alcohol control policy in the Baltic Countries and Poland in 2001-2020: an interrupted time-series analysis.Substance abuse treatment, prevention, and policy · 2023Article
- Are Lower-Strength Beers Gateways to Higher-Strength Beers? Time Series Analyses of Household Purchases from 64,280 British Households, 2015-2018.Alcohol and alcoholism (Oxford, Oxfordshire) · 2022Article
- [Potential impact of increased alcohol taxes on the alcohol-attributable burden of disease in Germany: a modelling study].Bundesgesundheitsblatt, Gesundheitsforschung, Gesundheitsschutz · 2022Article
- Modelling the impact of increased alcohol taxation on alcohol-attributable cancers in the WHO European Region.The Lancet regional health. Europe · 2021Article
- Government Options to Reduce the Impact of Alcohol on Human Health: Obstacles to Effective Policy Implementation.Nutrients · 2021Article
- What proportion of the price of a typical alcoholic beverage is taxation in Canada and why does it matter?Health promotion and chronic disease prevention in Canada : research, policy and practice · 2021Article
- Changes in Alcohol Consumption and Determinants of Excessive Drinking During the COVID-19 Lockdown in the Slovak Republic.Frontiers in public health · 2021Article
- The burden of alcohol on health care during COVID-19.Drug and alcohol review · 2021Article
- Problematic substance use or problematic substance use policies?Health promotion and chronic disease prevention in Canada : research, policy and practice · 2020Article
- Public Health Measures and Prevention of Alcohol-Associated Liver Disease.Journal of clinical and experimental hepatologyReview
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
introductionIn 2017, Canada increased alcohol excise taxes for the first time in over three decades. In this article, we describe a model to estimate various effects of additional tax and price policies that are predicted to improve health outcomes.
methodsWe obtained alcohol sales and taxation data for 2016/17 for all Canadian jurisdictions from Statistics Canada and product-level sales data for British Columbia. We modelled effects of alternative price and tax policies - revenue-neutral taxes, inflation-adjusted taxes and minimum unit prices (MUPs) - on consumption, revenues and harms. We used published price elasticities to estimate impacts on consumption and revenue and the International Model for Alcohol Harms and Policies (InterMAHP) to estimate impacts on alcohol-attributable mortality and morbidity.
resultsOther things being equal, revenue-neutral alcohol volumetric taxes (AVT) would have minimal influence on overall alcohol consumption and related harms. Inflation-adjusted AVT would result in 3.83% less consumption, 329 fewer deaths and 3762 fewer hospital admissions. A MUP of $1.75 per standard drink (equal to 17.05mL ethanol) would have reduced consumption by 8.68% in 2016, which in turn would have reduced the number of deaths by 732 and the number of hospitalizations by 8329 that year. Indexing alcohol excise taxes between 1991/92 and 2016/17 would have resulted in the federal government gaining approximately $10.97 billion. We estimated this could have prevented 4000-5400 deaths and 43 000-56 000 hospitalizations.
conclusionImproved public health outcomes would be made possible by (1) increasing alcohol excise tax rates across all beverages to compensate for past failures to index rates, and (2) setting a MUP of at least $1.75 per standard drink. While reducing alcohol-caused harms, these tax policies would have the added benefit of increasing federal government revenues.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.