All are invited to the CEDAR/MRC Epidemiology Seminar:

Assessing the impacts of the introduction of South Africa’s tax on sugar-sweetened beverages.

Nicholas Stacey, Department of Health Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science & SAMRC Centre for Health Economics and Decision Science, School of Public Health, University of the Witwatersrand.

MRC Epidemiology Unit meeting rooms 1 and 2, Institute of Metabolic Science, Cambridge Biomedical Campus.

Abstract

In response to an increasingly severe obesity and diet-related disease burden, on April 1 2018 South Africa implemented a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages titled the Health Promotion Levy (HPL). Like the UK’s Soft Drinks Industry Levy (SDIL), this tax is levied according to the sugar content of beverages. Unlike the UK’s SDIL, the HPL does not use discrete rate tiers and is rather levied at a constant rate per gram of sugar (over an initial threshold). This presentation will highlight findings from an ongoing evaluation of the HPL emphasizing heterogeneity in effects by products’ sugar content and heterogeneity in household responses by socio-economic status.

About Nicholas Stacey

Nicholas Stacey is a health economist and researcher at the SAMRC Centre for Health Economics and Decision Science at the School of Public Health of the University of the Witwatersrand and is a PhD student at the Department of Health Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interests and published work are on excise taxes and the use of public policy to influence behavioural determinants of health and health inequalities in South Africa and other low- and middle-income countries.

Twitter: @nick__stacey

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