Jeremy A Lauer & Franco Sassi 
HEALTH TAXES: POLICY AND PRACTICE [EPUB ebook] 
Policy and Practice

Virtually all fiscal measures influence people’s health, through their impacts on behaviour, consumption, income and wealth. A narrow subset of fiscal measures, however, can be more directly aimed at improving health by targeting behaviours and risks that are known to be strongly associated with health outcomes. The purpose of this book is to discuss the subject of these measures, which we define as ‘health taxes’. The book aims to enumerate key health taxes of interest, explore their positive and negative effects, and how these effects are influenced by the design of these taxes and the context in which they are applied. We ask how and where they can be implemented. Critically, we build an argument throughout the book for why policymakers across government should care about health taxes.

Contents:

• Introduction (Franco Sassi, Jeremy A Lauer, Agnes Soucat, Angeli Vigo, and Jeremias Paul)


• The Place for Health Taxes in the Wider Fiscal System (Céline Colin, Gioia de Melo, and Bert Brys)


• Protecting and Promoting Health Through Taxation: Evidence and Gaps (Lisa M Powell and Frank J Chaloupka)


• Supply-Side Responses to Health Taxes (Annalisa Belloni and Franco Sassi)


• The UK Soft Drinks Industry Levy as an Incentive for Beverage Reformulation (Martin White, Jean Adams, Cherry Law, and Peter Scarborough)


• The Labour Market Impact of Health Taxes (Sarah Mounsey, Lisa M Powell, and Frank J Chaloupka)


• Impacts of Health Taxes on the Attainment of the SDGs (Norman Maldonado-Vargas and Blanca Llorente)


• Expanding Health Taxation to Other Unhealthy Behaviours and Harmful Activities (Andreia Costa Santos, Thiago Hérick de Sá, Michael Oliver Hinsch, Ernesto Sanchez Triana, and Jeremy A Lauer)


• The Design of Effective Health Taxes (Lisa M Powell and Frank J Chaloupka)


• Health Taxes and Illicit Trade: Evidence and Courses of Action (Norman Maldonado-Vargas)


• Public Governance and Financing, and Earmarking Health Taxes (Ceren Ozer and Susan P Sparkes)


• Managing the Politics of Earmarked Health Taxes (Katherine Smith and Mark Hellowell)


• Monitoring and Measuring Health Taxes (Rosa Carolina Sandoval, Maxime Roche, Anne-Marie Perucic, Miriam Alvarado, Itziar Belausteguigoitia, Luis Galicia, and Guillermo Paraje)


• Health Taxes and Trade Law (Benn Mc Grady and Kritika Khanijo)


• A Political Economy Analysis of Health Taxes (Thomas F Babor, Jeff Collin, and Maristela G Monteiro)


• The Role of Civil Society in Tobacco Tax Reform in the Philippines (Filomeno Sta Ana, Angeli Vigo, and Jeremias Paul)


• The Future of Health Taxes: Helping It Happen (Angeli Vigo, Jeremy A Lauer, Franco Sassi, and Agnes Soucat)

Readership: Fiscal policymakers, health policymakers, stakeholders and activists in civil society, staff in international organizations, young professionals and students in global health and fiscal policy, and academic researchers.

Jeremy A Lauer joined Strathclyde University in February 2020 as a professor of management science following a career (1995–2020) as an economist with the World Health Organization (WHO). Jeremy has a bachelor’s degree (AB, 1986) in mathematics and philosophy from St John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, master’s degrees (MA, MSc, 1991) in economics and in agricultural and applied economics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a doctorate (Ph D, 2009) in health policy and management from Erasmus University Rotterdam. Jeremy has contributed to an influential body of work on the cost effectiveness of interventions against cardiovascular risk factors and disease, respiratory conditions, cancers, maternal and child health, HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis and chronic diseases, as well as on health systems research and topics in epidemiology, modelling and statistics. Jeremy, working with his WHO colleagues, finalised a major update on the cost effectiveness of 500 interventions covering 20 areas of disease and risk factors for WHO-CHOICE in 2020. Jeremy has served as principal investigator and co-investigator on research projects in breast-cancer and chronic-disease control while at the WHO and has been a member of Steering Committees or Technical Advisory Groups at the University of Stellenbosch (SACEMA), the University of Basel (Swiss TPH) and the University of Bergen (CIH). In 2016, Jeremy advised the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Commission on Health Employment and Economic Growth on fiscal space for health workforce expansion in lower- and lower-middle income countries. In 2018, Jeremy was invited to advise the G20 health ministers’ working group on synergies between the health system and the economy. In 2018, he led the economic analysis for the flagship 2019 WHO publication A Healthier Humanity. In 2016, while at WHO, Jeremy initiated and subsequently led a global WHO project on health taxes, health financing and fiscal reform for health. This book is a product of that work.Franco Sassi graduated with a degree in economics and a doctorate in health economics from the University of London in 2000. He is currently chair in International Health Policy and Economics and director of the Centre for Health Economics & Policy Innovation at Imperial College Business School, after leaving the position of senior health economist and head of the Public Health Programme at the OECD. Previously, he was senior lecturer in Health Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and held adjunct and visiting positions at a number of universities in the United States, including the University of California at Berkeley, Harvard University, the University of California at San Francisco and Duke University — as well as at the Université de Montréal in Canada and at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Rome. Professor Sassi’s research focusses on economic analysis of health services, the economics of chronic disease prevention and measuring inequalities in access to healthcare. He has been principal investigator and project coordinator of the EU project Science & Technology in Childhood Obesity Policy (STOP). He is the lead author of Obesity and the Economics of Prevention: Fit Not Fat (OECD and Edward Elgar, 2010), editor and author of Tackling Harmful Use: Economics and Public Health Policy (OECD, 2015) and Promoting Health, Preventing Disease: The Economic Case (OUP, 2015); and author of a large number of publications on the economics of chronic disease prevention. He was awarded a 2000–2001 Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellowship in Health Care Policy.Agnès Soucat is the director of the Division of Health and Social Protection of the French Development Agency (Agence française de développement). She was previously the director of the Department of Health Systems, Governance and Financing at the WHO. Prior to that, Dr Soucat held the position of director for Human Development for the African Development Bank, where she was responsible for the health, education and social protection activities of the Bank for 53 African countries; she also held the position of global lead economist for the Health, Nutrition and Population Global Practice Group of the World Bank. She has over 30 years of experience in poverty reduction and health, covering more than 70 countries in Africa, Asia and Europe. Dr Soucat was a pioneer in several fields of innovations in healthcare financing, including community-based financing and performance-based financing, and she has authored seminal publications on these topics. She is also a co-author of the World Bank’s World Development Report 2004: Making Services Work for Poor People, and of the Lancet Commission report Global Health 2035: A World Converging Within a Generation. Dr Soucat was a Commissioner on the recent Lancet and Rockefeller Commission on Planetary Health. She also did extensive work on the labour market dynamics of the health workforce in Africa. This book on health taxes is the direct result of her leadership on innovative financing while at WHO. Dr Soucat holds an MD and a master’s degree in nutrition from the University of Nancy in France as well as a master’s of public health and a Ph D in health economics from Johns Hopkins University.Angeli Vigo is responsible for parliamentary engagement and co-manages the inter-agency collaboration on health taxes at the WHO. After training in law at the University of the Philippines, Angeli was admitted to the Philippine Bar in 2012. She worked at the Supreme Court of the Philippines and taught at De La Salle University and Lyceum University in Manila, before moving to WHO headquarters in Geneva in 2015. She worked in tobacco product regulation for two years, during which she managed the development of the technical report series of the ‘WHO Study Group on Tobacco Product Regulation’ (WHO Tob Reg). These reports provide the WHO Director- General with scientifically sound, evidence-based recommendations for Member States about tobacco product regulation. In 2017, Angeli authored the background paper on the economic implications of health taxes for the WHO strategy meeting held that year — which was the first time that tobacco, alcohol and sugar-sweetened products were considered under the same policy umbrella. Since then, she co-manages the joint activities of a multi-agency collaboration on health taxes composed of a dozen international organisations, including the World Bank, the OECD and the Asian Development Bank and is responsible for parliamentary outreach to several countries in Africa and Asia.

‘A highly relevant book for the challenges of the post-pandemic world. Few tools are as effective as taxes for health in improving well-being while ensuring fiscal sustainability.’ – Mauricio Cárdenas Columbia University Former Minister of Finance, Colombia

‘Taxation impacts behaviours: of the public, manufacturers and purveyors. This book shows how we can improve health through fiscal measures and opens discussion on ‘Health in all taxes’. A great contribution.’ – Dame Sally Davies Master of Trinity College, Cambridge Former Chief Medical Officer for the United Kingdom

‘A compelling case for health taxes. The book offers ammunition to those in national governments, global institutions and civil society making a case for health taxes and practical guidance to those designing and implementing them. They leave us with no excuse: the time for action is now.’ – Kalipso Chalkidou Head of Health Finance at The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria

‘Health taxes are a ‘win’ for inclusive growth and sustainable development, a ‘win’ for public-sector governance and global public goods, and a ‘win’ for individual welfare and human flourishing. Required reading for policymakers and practitioners in health, development and fiscal policy.’ – Amanda Glassman Executive Vice President of Center for Global Development (CGD)CEO of CGD Europe