Time：Oct. 27, 2021（Wed.）10:00-11:30 Beijing Time

Speaker：LIU Shiyong（Professor of Beijing Normal University, Zhuhai）

Topic：Health and Economic Impacts of Consumption and Taxation Policy on Tobacco, Alcohol, and Sugar-Sweetened Beverages in China

Tencent Meeting: for PKU students, please send your name and school to 18701189960@163.com for the link. 

Summary:

Noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) have become the major health challenges globally, killing 41 million people each year and accounting for 71% of all death worldwide. Among factors contributing to the rising trend of NCDs, some risk factors like excessive consumptions of tobacco, alcohol and sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) are common and preventable through well-designed interventions. In China, smoking rate among people aged 15 and over was 26.6% and the number of smokers increased to 308 million in 2018. As a social “Guanxi” lubricant in China, alcohol consumption drove prevalence of heavy episodic drinking (HED) as high as 22.7% in 2016, which is higher than that of world average (18.2%). Although SSBs consumption per capital per day in China is lower than that of world (11.71 vs 208.24 grams, 2015) at large, a fact that adolescent obesity attributable to excessive SSBs must be paid attention. This report uses two survey data, namely China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) 1993-2015 and China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) 2011-2015 to estimate the health effects and price elasticity of demand for consumption of tobacco, alcohol, and sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) in China, and investigate the welfare effects of levying tax on such substances in China, and explores the responses of different income groups to tax policies on such substances.