The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the effect
on alcohol abuse of banning broadcast advertising of alcoholic
beverages. The effect of a ban cannot be studied using data from
one country because the adoption of new advertising bans is an
infrequent event and requires many years for adjustment. However,
an international data set can be used since there is considerable
variation in the use of advertising bans across countries. The data
used in this study are a pooled time series from 17 countries for
the period 1970 to 1983. The empirical measures of alcohol abuse
are alcohol consumption, liver cirrhosis mortality rates, and
highway fatality rates. The cultural factors which influence
alcohol use are measured by sets of country dummy variables. The
empirical results show that countries with bans on spirits
advertising have about 10 percent lower alcohol consumption and
motor vehicle fatality rates than countries with no bans. The
results also show that countries with bans on beer and wine
advertising have about 23 percent lower alcohol consumption and
motor vehicle fatality rates than countries with only bans on
spirits advertising.
*Published:
Journal of Health Economics, Vol. 10, pp. 65-79, (1991).
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