What happened to alcohol consumption and problems in the Nordic countries when alcohol taxes were decreased and borders opened?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Room. R., Bloomfield, K., Gmel, G., Grittner, U., Gustafsson, N.-K., Mäkelä, P., Österberg, E., Ramstedt, M., Rehm, J. & Wicki, M. (2013). What happened to alcohol consumption and problems in the Nordic countries when alcohol taxes were decreased and borders opened? International Journal of Alcohol and Drug Research, 2(1), 77-87. doi: 10.7895/ijadr.v2i1.58 (http://dx.doi.org/10.7895/ijadr.v2i1.58)Aims: The study tests the effects of reductions in alcohol taxation and increases in travellers’ allowances on alcohol consumption and related harm in Denmark, Finland, and southern Sweden. In late 2003 and early 2004, taxes on alcoholic beverages were reduced in Denmark and Finland, and the abolition of quantitative quotas on alcohol import for personal use from other European Union countries made cheaper alcohol more available in Denmark, Finland, and Sweden.Method: Analyses of routine statistical register data and summaries of results from longitudinal and repeated cross-sectional population surveys and other previous analyses, with northern Sweden as a control site for secular trends.Results: Contrary to expectations, alcohol consumption—as based on register data—increased only in Finland and not in Denmark and southern Sweden, and self-reported survey data did not show an increase in any site. In Finland, alcohol-attributable harms in register data increased, especially in people with low socio-economic status. Few such effects were found in Denmark and southern Sweden. Neither did results for self-reported alcohol-attributable problems show any general increases in the three sites. These results remained after controlling for regression to the mean and modelling of drop-outs.Conclusions: Harms measured in register data did tend to increase in the short term with the policy change, particularly in Finland, where the tax changes were broader. But reducing price and increasing availability does not always increase alcohol consumption and harm. Effects are dampened in affluent societies, and other factors may intervene. The results for Finland also suggest some limits for general population surveys in testing for relatively small policy effects.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".