South Africa's Health Promotion Levy: Excise tax findings and equity potential

Increasing the federal excise tax on cigarettes.

In fiscal year 1970, U.S. federal cigarette tax revenues accounted for 13 percent of all federal excise tax collections and 1 percent of total federal budget receipts. By fiscal year 1980, federal cigarette tax revenues accounted for only 10 percent of all federal excise tax collections and only 0.5 percent of total federal budget receipts.’ In fiscal year 1970, U.S. state and local cigarette t...

Health Promotion Through an Equity Lens

Equity Tax and Shelter

Taxes have major costs beyond the collected revenue: deadweight from distorted incentives, compliance and enforcement costs, etc. A simple market mechanism, the Equity Tax, avoids these problems for the trickiest cases: corporate, dividend, and capital gains taxes. It exploits the ability of the share prices to reflect the expected true annual return (as perceived by investors, not as defined b...

Health Promotion in an Age of Normative Equity and Rampant Inequality

The world was different when the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion was released 30 years ago. Concerns over the environment and what we now call the ‘social determinants of health’ were prominent in 1986. But the acceleration of ecological crises and economic inequalities since then, in a more complex and multi-polar world, pose dramatically new challenges for those committed to the original ...

The effect of excise tax increases on cigarette prices in South Africa

INTRODUCTION The effectiveness of excise tax increases as a tool for reducing tobacco consumption depends largely on how the tax increases impact the retail price. We estimate this relationship in South Africa for 2001-2015. DATA Statistics South Africa provided disaggregated cigarette price data, used in the calculation of the Consumers' Price Index. Data on the excise tax per cigarette were...