Alcohol consumption in the UK, 1955-85: a system-wide analysis.

In two recent articles, Clements and Johnson (1983) and Clements and Finke (1984) applied Theil's (1980) differential approach to consumption theory to analyse the demand for alcoholic beverages (namely, beer, wine and spirits) in Australia and the US. In this paper we apply the same methodology to the consumption of the three alcoholic beverages to the UK. Our aim is to obtain some reasonably reliable estimates of income and price elasticities of the demand for alcoholic beverages. One of the uses of such estimates is the analysis of the effects of taxes on alcohol consumption. This paper is organized into the following sections. In Section II we present the UK data. In Section III we give the demand model and in Section IV we use the UK data to estimate these demand equations. In Section V we analyse the effects of alcohol taxes in determining the pattern of alcohol consumption. In the last section we give our concluding comments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]