On January 1, 2014 the Mexican government instituted two taxes. One was a 1-peso-per-liter (effectively around 10% of 2013 prices) specific excise tax on any beverage (powder, concentrate or ready to drink) with added sugar that is nonalcoholic (called sugar-sweetened beverage or SSB tax). Concurrently, they instituted an 8% ad valorem tax on a wide range of nonessential foods with energy density ?275kcal/100g targeting foods high in added sugars or solid fats (herein nonessential food tax). Jointly these cover 20-25% of each age grouping's daily caloric intake in Mexico. Mexico is the first country in the Americas and second country globally with a 10% or greater SSB tax (France is the other). The present proposal focuses on developing a basic understanding of the tax and the industry response in terms of pricing and price promotions and consumer's changes in purchases. Mexico and Mexican-Americans face extremely high levels of obesity, visceral fat and diabetes. Our overriding goal is to understand whether the SSB and nonessential food taxes shifted prices of both taxed and untaxed consumer packaged food/beverage products, product sizes, reformulations, and ultimately food purchases both in terms of volume and nutrients (calories, total sugars, sodium and saturated fats). We will use a combination of government and commercial household purchase data to study changes in food and beverage prices before and after the taxes, changes in food and beverage purchases, as well as overall food purchase patterns. We will use innovative software from The George Institute to collect, enter and link nutrition facts panel (NFP) and ingredient data of packaged products collected from stores across Mexico in 2014 and 2016-2018 with food purchase data from the 2012-2018 Nielsen Household Consumer Panel Service (CPS) that represents 80% of the Mexican population. Our longitudinal analysis will focus mainly on longitudinal difference-on-difference fixed and random effects models. Should we find significant changes in volume and nutrients purchased after the tax was instituted, future work will include collection data to study changes in dietary intake, body composition and risk/prevalence of key cardio metabolic problems, as well as how revenues from these taxes are spent.
Globally, SSB and nonessential food taxes represent potentially critical options for preventing many diet- related health problems. This proposal represents the first rigorous real-world evaluation of an SSB and non- essential food tax at the national level. The behavioral and public health implications of this evaluation are relevant to both Mexico and the United States.
