Excise and Import Taxes on Wine vs Beer and Spirits: An International Comparison

Nearly all countries tax the domestic consumption of alcoholic beverages. However, the rates of taxation, and the tax instruments used, vary enormously between countries. This paper provides estimates, for a wide range of high-income and developing countries, of the consumer tax equivalents (CTEs) of wine, beer and spirits taxes as of 2008. It encompasses wholesale sales taxes, excise taxes and import tariffs expressed both in dollars per litre of alcohol and as a percentage of what the wholesale price would be without those taxes (since many taxes are volumetric and so their percentage CTE rates vary with the price of the product). The wine CTE tends to be lower in countries with a large wine industry, by which standard Australia is shown to have relatively high wine CTEs at least for premium wine but, because Australia uses a percentage tax rather than the far more commonly used volumetric tax measure, a relatively low rate for non-premium wine.