Price and income elasticities for alcohol in Sri Lanka
Abstract
Aims: To study the effect of changes in income as well as prices of beer and arrack, on alcohol sales in Sri Lanka during the period 1981–2017.
Design: The analyses were conducted by means of ARIMA time series analysis for arrack and beer separately.
Measures: Yearly data on the sales of beer and arrack in the entire country were used. National GDP figures were used as a proxy measure of income, and yearly price data for arrack and beer were from Colombo, the largest metropolitan area in the country.
Results: No short-term effects of changes in price or income were found on sales. However, changes in the price of beer were significant, with a lag structure, which implies a delayed effect of price changes on the sales of beer. A significant cross-price effect of changes in the price of beer on arrack sales was found as well.
Conclusions: Sales of alcohol in Sri Lanka are not affected by price changes to the same extent as in high income countries. Most likely, the explanations will be found in the different drinking cultures between Sri Lanka and these countries.
In consideration of publishing this article the authors transfer, assign, or otherwise convey all copyright ownership to the International Journal of Alcohol and Drug Research. By this transfer, the article becomes the property of the International Journal of Alcohol and Drug Research and may not be published elsewhere without written permission from the journal.
This transfer of copyright also implies transfer of rights for printed, electronic, microfilm, and facsimile publication. The author(s) will receive no royalty or other monetary compensation for transferring the copyright of the article to the International Journal of Alcohol and Drug Research. IJADR, in turn, grants each author the right to republish the article, without paying royalties to IJADR, in any book of which he or she is the author or editor, subject to the express conditions that (a) the author notify the International Journal of Alcohol and Drug Research in writing of this republication and (b) a credit line attributes the original publication to the International Journal Of Alcohol and Drug Research.
Licence:
Articles are licenced with a Creative Commons License Deed -- you are free to share articles but must give appropriate attribution, may not use for commercial purposes or distribute modified works. See CC/BY-NC/ND/4.0/.
Author Agreement:
As the submitting author, and on behalf of all of the manuscript authors I agree with the terms above relating to the copyright transfer of the manuscript to the International Journal of Alcohol and Drug Research.
