Reforming Alcohol Taxes: Health and Fiscal Issues

描述（由申请人提供）：本项目有两个主要目标。首先，我们建议在考虑到外部性（例如，醉酒司机对其他道路使用者的风险，酒精引起的疾病对公共或团体医疗服务的负担）和消费税和其他税收之间的适当平衡的情况下，估计酒精税的最佳水平。这将涉及制定最优酒精税的概念模型，作为更广泛的财政系统的一部分，利用家庭数据对实施最优税收模型所必需的某些酒精税行为反应进行计量经济学估计，并更新和综合有关外部成本和其他参数值的现有证据。第二，我们将研究如何改善不同种类酒精饮料之间以及酒精税和酒驾费之间的税负分配。这将涉及使用理论模型来估计在给定酒精税收总额的情况下，个人酒精饮料的最佳税率，并估计将一些酒精税收负担转移到对醉酒司机的处罚所带来的经济收益。将比较这些税收改革对社会的净收益与按比例增加所有现有酒精饮料税的净收益，并研究其对酒精消费、避免死亡和非致命伤害/疾病以及与酒精有关的交通事故发生率的影响，以便在不同的改革选择中确定优先次序。此外，我们使用概念框架来解释美国和其他四个经合组织国家之间的税率差异，通过评估可能证明美国设定比其他国家更低的消费税的因素（例如，更低的政府收入要求）和可能证明更高税收的因素（例如，美国更高的酒驾发生率）。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project has two main objectives. First, we propose to estimate the optimal level of alcohol taxation taking account of both externalities (e.g., the risk to other road users from drunk drivers, the burden on public or group medical services from alcohol-induced illness) and the appropriate balance between excise taxes and other taxes in financing the government's budget. This will involve developing a conceptual model of optimal alcohol taxes as part of the broader fiscal system, using household data to develop econometric estimates of certain behavioral responses to alcohol taxes that are necessary to implement the optimal tax model, and updating and synthesizing available evidence on external costs and other parameter values. Second, we will examine opportunities for improving the allocation of the tax burden between different kinds of alcoholic beverages and between alcohol taxation and drunk driver fees. This will involve using the theoretical model to estimate the optimal tax rate on individual alcoholic beverages, for a given amount of total alcohol tax revenue, and estimating economic gains from shifting some of the alcohol tax burden onto drunk driver penalties. The net benefits to society from these tax reforms will be compared with those from a proportionate increase in all existing alcoholic beverage taxes, and their implications for alcohol consumption, deaths and non-fatal injuries/illness avoided, and incidence of alcohol-related traffic accidents, will be studied in order to prioritize among different options for reform. Furthermore, we use the conceptual framework to explain differences in tax rates between the United States and four other OECD countries by assessing factors that might justify the United States setting lower excise taxes than in other countries (e.g., lower government revenue requirements) and factors that might justify higher taxes (e.g., the higher incidence of drunk driving in the United States).