Impact of soda tax on beverage price, sale, purchase, and consumption in the US: a systematic review and meta-analysis of natural experiments

Frontiers in Public Health

Public Health

Ruopeng An¹  Jing Shen²  Junjie Wang³  Fan Yang⁴ 

[1] Brown School, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, United States;Department of Physical Education, China University of Geosciences (Beijing), Beijing, China;School of Kinesiology and Health Promotion, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, Liaoning, China;School of Public Administration, Dongbei University of Finance and Economics, Dalian, Liaoning, China;

关键词: sugar-sweetened beverages;    tax;    systematic review;    meta-analysis;    natural experiments;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpubh.2023.1126569

 received in 2022-12-18, accepted in 2023-09-07,  发布年份 2023

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundAs a primary source of added sugars in the US diet, sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) consumption is presumed to contribute to obesity prevalence and poor oral health. We systematically synthesized and quantified evidence from US-based natural experiments concerning the impact of SSB taxes on beverage prices, sales, purchases, and consumption.MethodsA keyword and reference search was performed in PubMed, Web of Science, Cochrane Library, Scopus, and EconLit from the inception of an electronic bibliographic database to Oct 31, 2022. Meta-analysis was conducted to estimate the pooled effect of soda taxes on SSB consumption, prices, passthrough rate, and purchases.ResultsTwenty-six natural experiments, all adopting a difference-in-differences approach, were included. Studies assessed soda taxes in Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco in California, Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, Boulder in Colorado, Seattle in Washington, and Cook County in Illinois. Tax rates ranged from 1 to 2 ¢/oz. The imposition of the soda tax was associated with a 1.06 ¢/oz. (95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.90, 1.22) increase in SSB prices and a 27.3% (95% CI = 19.3, 35.4%) decrease in SSB purchases. The soda tax passthrough rate was 79.7% (95% CI = 65.8, 93.6%). A 1 ¢/oz. increase in soda tax rate was associated with increased prices of SSBs by 0.84 ¢/oz (95% CI = 0.33, 1.35).ConclusionSoda taxes could be effective policy leverage to nudge people toward purchasing and consuming fewer SSBs. Future research should examine evidence-based classifications of SSBs, targeted use of revenues generated by taxes to reduce health and income disparities, and the feasibility of redesigning the soda tax to improve efficiency.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
Copyright © 2023 Shen, Wang, Yang and An.