The extant literature on fat taxes and thin subsidies tends to focus on the overall e ectiveness of such scal instruments in altering diets and improving health. However, little is known about the welfare impacts of scal food policies on society. This paper lls a gap in the literature by assessing the distributional impacts and welfare e ects resulting from a tax-subsidy combination on di erent...

In this commentary, we argue for the implementation of a sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) tax as a tool to help address the global obesity and diabetes epidemics. Consumption of SSBs has increased exponentially over the last several decades, a trend that has been an important contributor to the obesity and diabetes epidemics. Prior evidence demonstrates that a SSB tax will likely decrease SSB con...

To combat growing levels of obesity, health-related taxes have been suggested with taxes on foods high in fat or sugar. Such taxes have been criticised on the basis of their regressivity and potentially adverse impact upon poverty. This paper analyses the effect of such taxes on a range of poverty measures and also examines the effect of a revenue-neutral tax subsidy mixed with a tax on unhealt...

a r t i c l e i n f o JEL classification: H32 L13 Q18 I18 Keywords: Excise tax Ad valorem tax Tax incidence Strategic pricing Differentiated products Soft drinks Because soft drink (SD) consumption is considered to be a contributor to the 'epidemic' of obesity, there is a growing interest in evaluating the impact on SD consumption of alternative tax policies. In this paper, we propose a methodo...

Refundable tax credits and food assistance are the largest transfer programs available to able-bodied working poor and near-poor families in the United States, and simultaneous participation in these programs has more than doubled since the early 2000s. To understand this growth, we construct a series of two-year panels from the 1981-2013 waves of the Current Population Survey Annual Social and...

Whereas public information campaigns have failed to reverse the rising trend in obesity, economists support food taxes as they suggest they can force individuals to change their eating behavior and make the agro-food industry think more about healthy food products. Excise taxes based on the unhealthy nutrient content would be more effective since they impact more on unhealthy food products than...

We assessed public opinion on nutrition-related policies to address child obesity: a soda tax, restrictions on advertising unhealthy foods and beverages to children, and restrictions on siting fast food restaurants and convenience stores near schools. We analyzed data from 998 adults (aged ≥18 years) in the 2011 Los Angeles County Health Survey. Support was highest for advertising restrictions ...

The Administrative Justice Court annulled the directive that was issued by the Iranian National Tax Administration. According to the directive, kindergarten, food, commuting, … subsidies are not exempt from the payroll tax. In this research, which is conducted with the descriptive-analytical approach, the exemption or the lack of exemption of the subsidies is studied with regard to the tax law....

In this paper we present new evidence of cross-border shopping in response to sales taxation. While several instructive studies provide estimates of the cross-border shopping effect, we utilize a unique opportunity to evaluate the effect of a large discrete change in sales tax policy. Using county level data on food income and sales tax data for West Virginia over the 1982-2000 period we estima...