This book is the result of knowledge exchange between the staff of the WHO and a multidisciplinary team of researchers and policymakers. Its purpose is to bring sharper focus to the subject of health taxes, and to expose its various facets in turn. It was launched on 24 June 2022.
Virtually all fiscal measures influence people’s health, through their impacts on behaviour, consumption, income and wealth. A narrow subset of fiscal measures, however, can be more directly aimed at improving health by targeting behaviours and risks that are known to be strongly associated with health outcomes.
The book Health Taxes: Policy and Practice aims to enumerate key health taxes of interest, explore their positive and negative effects, and how these effects are influenced by the design of these taxes and the context in which they are applied. We ask how and where they can be implemented. Critically, the book builds an argument for why policymakers across government should care about health taxes.
This book, the product of a multi-year knowledge exchange effort led by the WHO, represents the first global in-depth treatment of health taxes as an independent domain of social policy. It attempts to address concerns by policymakers, and health and fiscal sector practitioners. The chapters have been developed by leading experts in the field of health, tax policy, public financial management, trade law and governance and have undergone peer review by experts in the academe, ministries of finance and treasury, and international organizations such as the WHO, World Bank, and the OECD.
