Income or earnings <\/a>are not included in price comparisons, meaning the ranking does not take wages or other measures of personal income into account.<\/p>\n\u201cThere is an important distinction between the price of alcohol, and the affordability of alcohol,\u201d Professor Colin Angus from the University of Sheffield told Euronews Business.<\/p>\n
A country with low alcohol prices but low disposable incomes may still have low affordability, and the opposite can also be true.<\/p>\n
\u201cTax is a key factor in driving [price] differences\u2026Higher alcohol taxes are one of the most important drivers of higher alcohol prices in some European countries, most notably those in Northern Europe,\u201d added Angus.<\/p>\n
He noted that in the Northern European regions such as Scandinavia, Ireland and the UK, higher tax rates are generally a response to high levels of alcohol consumption and alcohol-related harm. <\/p>\n
In 2020, the last year the UK was part of the comparison, its index was 139 while the EU average was 100.<\/p>\n
\u201cMost Mediterranean countries have much lower levels of alcohol consumption and harm nowadays and correspondingly less need for higher tax rates to disincentivise heavy drinking,\u201d he added. <\/p>\n
Dr Jakob Manthey from the University of Hamburg also emphasised that higher excise tax rates on certain alcoholic beverages are the key driver of differences in alcohol prices.<\/p>\n
For example, in 2020, the five countries in the WHO European Region with the highest share of alcohol taxes of beer retail price were Finland, Turkey, Norway, Estonia, and Iceland. The tax shares ranged between 28% and 39% and the tax shares are larger for spirits (can be 50% or more). In low-taxation countries, however, the tax share is 10% or less.<\/p>\n
Raising taxes increases government revenue<\/p>\n
\u201cThese data show that a lot of the retail price can be determined by excise taxes,\u201d Manthey told Euronews Business. <\/p>\n
He pointed out that when taxes are raised, this is not only linked to reduction in consumption. \u201cRaising taxes also increases the government tax revenue,\u201d he added. <\/p>\n
Colin Angus also explained that another important factor in setting rates of alcohol taxation appears to be alcohol production, at least for wine. Across Europe, countries that produce wine in significant volumes almost exclusively have no, or very low, tax rates on wine. On the other hand, non-wine-producing countries tend to tax wine more highly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On average, \u20ac1.50 out of every \u20ac100 that households spend on goods and services in the EU goes…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":173741,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[102468,114,184,85,46,102469,1016,1584],"class_list":{"0":"post-173740","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-alcohol-prices","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-economy","11":"tag-il","12":"tag-israel","13":"tag-special-consumption-tax","14":"tag-taxation","15":"tag-taxes"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173740"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173740\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/173741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}