🌟New pre-print🌟 With @jschoeley.bsky.social, we used methods developed for estimating cause-specific excess deaths and applied them to UK alcohol duty revenue, both overall and by drink type, to estimate how recent trends in alcohol sales compared to pre-pandemic. 🧵 doi.org/10.1101/2024... - ThreadSky

victimofmaths.bsky.social • 72 days ago

🌟New pre-print🌟

With @jschoeley.bsky.social, we used methods developed for estimating cause-specific excess deaths and applied them to UK alcohol duty revenue, both overall and by drink type, to estimate how recent trends in alcohol sales compared to pre-pandemic.

🧵

https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.12.12.24318899

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nigelsadler.bsky.social•72 days ago

Might interest you @cjsnowdon.bsky.social

victimofmaths.bsky.social•72 days ago

Here's the overall results - monthly 'excess revenue' compared to the pre-pandemic trend. You can read this just like an excess mortality chart - above the line means more revenue than expected, below means less.

I think this shows three really interesting things:

victimofmaths.bsky.social•72 days ago

1) Overall alcohol sales during 2020 and 2021 were basically in line with previous trends, except that sales fell during lockdowns, offset by higher than usual sales when restrictions were relaxed.

victimofmaths.bsky.social•72 days ago

2) Alcohol duty receipts have fallen below trend during the cost-of-living crisis, with this effect increasing markedly at around the time of Liz Truss' short-lived premiership and remaining below trend since.

victimofmaths.bsky.social•72 days ago

3) The only exception to this pattern is in the summer of 2023, where duty receipts spiked dramatically immediately before government reforms to alcohol taxation came into force. This is a process known as 'forestalling' - essentially alcohol producers can choose when to pay duty on their products.

victimofmaths.bsky.social•72 days ago

Normally, they keep them in their warehouses and only pay tax at the last possible moment when they ship them out to shops. But if they know a tax increase is coming, then they'll chose to pay the duty on everything they've got before the rise comes into force.

victimofmaths.bsky.social•72 days ago

This leads to a big spike in duty receipts immediately before the tax change, and a corresponding slump immediately after. This is *exactly* what we see last summer.

The alcohol industry have tried quite hard to pretend that this isn't what is happening, and instead compared duty receipts...

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