The Sale of Alcohol in Denmark - Recent Developments and Dependencies on Prices/Taxes.

Abstract

How do prices affect the choice of types of alcohol in Denmark? We study the Danish sale of alcoholic beverages in a time series framework. First, we look at annual data from 1980 investigating the hypothesis of a fairly stable level of sales. We conclude stationarity of sales and we also find that the income elasticity of total sales has been zero. Secondly, we analyse the composition of the alcohol sale between beer, wine and spirits in a multivariate model conditional on the development in prices. For this analysis we use Johansen cointegration techniques. Again we test that income can be omitted from the model and we use the model to derive the effects on the composition of alcohol sales of three different sets of changes in the alcohol taxation.