Increasing obesity, worldwide, is becoming an increasingly important public health challenge. Raising the excise tax on SSBs is seen as a partial solution, and a relatively easy intervention.
In April 2018, South Africa introduced an excise tax on sugar-sweetened beverages. This tax is in line with the growing international trend to tax unhealthy foods to slow down the obesity epidemic. Obesity is likely to become an increasingly important issue for the public health community in decades to come, and REEP wants to support the debate by creating policy-relevant research in this area. To date we have been involved in a small number of research papers in this area, and have supported the government in implementing this tax, based on our experience in tobacco control.
- In 2019, REEP received funding from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) to conduct a study on sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) in Kenya. The lead partner was the International Institute of Legislative Affairs in Kenya. We aimed to estimate the price and cross-price elasticities of demand for SSBs, and to develop a simulation model to estimate the likely consumption and fiscal effects if the government of Kenya were to impose an excise tax on SSBs. Sadly, the study on estimating the price and cross-price elasticities was abandoned, as the estimates were unusable and counterintuitive. However, the modelling exercise resulted in a paper being published in a Working Paper Series by the International Centre for Tax and Development: ICTD WP141, The Likely Fiscal and Public Health Effects of an Excise Tax on Sugar sweetened Beverages in Kenya (published on 1 May 2022).