IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/pubeco/v52y1993i1p83-100.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The welfare effects of alcohol taxation

Author

Listed:
  • Irvine, Ian J.
  • Sims, William A.

Abstract

This paper analyses the question of how to appropriately tax alcoholic beverages at a disaggregated level. Using the theory of tax reform, the social cost of raising revenue from different alcoholic beverages is calculated. The externality associated with alcohol consumption is explicitly modeled. In conjunction with unusually high wedges between producer and consumer prices, this leads to results rarely encountered in the literature of the welfare effects of taxation. The problem is approached by building a multistage budgeting model of expenditure. This is necessitated by the availability of elasticity information only for aggregates of the goods in question while pricing policy must be developed at a more disaggregated level. The model is applied to a data set for 1989 for the province of Ontario, Canada. We find that there is a major scope for welfare-improving tax changes, but that such changes depend crucially upon the magnitude of the externality associated with alcohol consumption.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Irvine, Ian J. & Sims, William A., 1993. "The welfare effects of alcohol taxation," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 52(1), pages 83-100, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:pubeco:v:52:y:1993:i:1:p:83-100
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0047-2727(93)90106-4
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or search for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. James, Simon & Alley, Clinton, 2002. "Tax compliance, self-assessment and tax administration," MPRA Paper 26906, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    More about this item

    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:eee:pubeco:v:52:y:1993:i:1:p:83-100. 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: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/inca/505578 .

    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.