Economics and Finance in Action

Project
You are a policy advisor for a government’s Department of Health. You have been asked by the
government to write an economic report that addresses a key issue: is a sugar tax effective in
increasing the prices and reducing the consumption of sugar sweetened beverages?
Approach to and resources for the Project
You should base your investigation on the data and the findings from a research published by a
group of researchers in 2017. The paper is available online (an also in pdf format on QMplus) and the
following is the article’s reference:
Silver LD, Ng SW, Ryan-Ibarra S, Taillie LS, Induni M, Miles DR, et al. (2017) Changes in prices, sales,
consumer spending, and beverage consumption one year after a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages
in Berkeley, California, US: A before-and-after study. PLoS Med 14(4): e1002283.
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1002283
A brief summary of the paper, a video explaining the paper’s main findings and the datasets used in
the research are available from the following site:
http://globalfoodresearchprogram.web.unc.edu/research-in-the-united-states/u-spolicyevaluations/Berkeley-SSB-Tax/
Approach to the Project
On QMplus you will find three datasets (in excel format) used by the researchers in their
investigation. The researchers use three different types of data in order to investigate the impact of
the sugar tax:
1) a first investigation is based on a survey of prices of a number sugar-sweetened drinks sold in
local stores around the Berkeley area. The file with this data is available on QMplus under the
name “Berkeley Store Price Survey.xlsx”;
2) a second analysis involves the prices and volumes of sugar-sweetened drinks sold in large
superstores in and outside the Berkeley area. Due to confidentiality reasons not all data is made
available to us. The file “POS data.xlsx” includes a subset of the data that includes only drink
prices and not volumes sold;
3) a third analysis involves interviews with local residents in which they are asked about their
consumption of sugar-sweetened drinks before and after the introduction of the sugar tax. The
file “Phone survey data.xlsx” includes the survey data.
ECN126 Economics and Finance in Action School of Economics and Finance
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So, what are you expected to do?
• You are asked to carry out YOUR OWN analysis of the impact of the sugar tax on prices and
consumption of sugar-sweetened drinks in Berkeley and to write a research article/project
about it;
• You should make sure to include a brief literature review of at least five economics papers that
also focus on the effectiveness of sugar taxes;
• You are NOT asked to just summarise the research by Silver et al. (2017). You should take
inspiration from the article on how the research is carried out, you should read the article to
understand the data and you should use the article to get some ideas on evaluating the impact
of the sugar tax;
• You are expected to use the excel data to create statistics, tables, graphs, figures and any other
evidence of your choice that can help your research team assess what impact the sugar tax has
had in Berkeley. The evidence that you create can be similar to the one presented in the paper
but you should consider including additional tables, graphs etc. that can further help the reader;
• The paper includes some statistical analysis (inferential statistics) that you are unlikely to be
familiar with. You are not expected to replicate such an analysis but you could use your
knowledge from the Statistical Methods in Economics module to approximate the statistical
analysis.