IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/28960.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Effect of Beverage Taxes on Youth Consumption and BMI: Evidence from Mauritius

Author

Listed:
  • John Cawley
  • Michael R. Daly
  • Rebecca Thornton

Abstract

Taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) are relatively new and there is little evidence about their impact on SSB consumption or body mass index (as opposed to prices, purchases, or sales), their impact on youth (as opposed to on adults), or their impact in non-Western nations. This paper adds to the evidence base on all of these dimensions by estimating the effect of an SSB tax on the consumption and BMI of youth in Mauritius, an island nation in the Indian Ocean, which we compare to Maldives, another island nation in the Indian Ocean which did not implement an SSB tax during the time of our data. Results of difference-in-differences models indicate that the tax in Mauritius had no detectable impact on the consumption of SSBs or the body mass index of the pooled sample of boys and girls. However, models estimated separately by sex indicate that the probability that boys consumed SSBs fell by 9.4 percentage points (11%). These are among the first estimates of the effect of SSB taxes on youth consumption, and contribute to the limited evidence base on the impact of SSB taxes on weight, or in non-Western countries.

Suggested Citation

  • John Cawley & Michael R. Daly & Rebecca Thornton, 2021. "The Effect of Beverage Taxes on Youth Consumption and BMI: Evidence from Mauritius," NBER Working Papers 28960, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:28960
    Note: CH DEV EH PE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w28960.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • H2 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue
    • H3 - Public Economics - - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents
    • I12 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health Behavior
    • I18 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health
    • L66 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Manufacturing - - - Food; Beverages; Cosmetics; Tobacco
    • O1 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:28960. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.