Rebekah Stroud

Each year early career economists at IFS deliver a day of public economics talks, aimed at A-level and undergraduate students who have an interest in economics or might want to pursue a career in public policy research. As part of this year’s Festival of Social Science, we live streamed a selection of lectures from the series.

Reports suggest that the government is planning on introducing new measures to tackle obesity, including a ban on television advertising of food and drink products that are high in fat, sugar or salt before the 9pm watershed.

The spread of COVID-19, and international measures to contain it, are having a major impact on economic activity in the UK. In this observation we describe how this impact has varied across industries using data on share prices of firms listed on the London Stock Exchange, and how well targeted government support for workers and companies is in light of this.

These presentations were given as part of a day of lectures on Public Economics to students, held at the IFS.

In this Facebook Live event, IFS Research Economist Rebekah Stroud looked at the economics of "sin taxes", answering questions such as how high or low should these taxes be, and who bears the burden of them?

This presentation was given at the launch of the IFS Green Budget 2019.

Taxes on motoring raise around £40 billion a year for the exchequer (around 5% of government revenue), equivalent to about £750 per adult in the UK. Most of this comes from fuel duties, which in 2019–20 are expected to raise £28 billion in their own right plus an additional £5.7 billion from the VAT payable on the duties. Another £6.5 billion comes from vehicle excise duty (VED) and £0.2 billion from the London congestion charge.

Over 50 countries and localities, including the UK, have recently introduced taxes on soft drinks. In new IFS research funded by the National Institute of Health Research under the Department for Health’s Obesity Policy Research Unit, we survey the evidence on the effects of soft drink taxes on prices and purchases in 27 studies covering 11 jurisdictions (Berkeley, Boulder, Catalonia, Chile, France, Maine, Mexico, Ohio, Philadelphia, Portugal and Washington).

Advertising of high fat, salt or sugar (HFSS) food and drink during children’s television programmes has been banned in the UK since 2007. The Government has recently announced that they will consult on further advertising restrictions for products high in fat, salt and sugar on TV.

The government has launched a consultation on whether to ban the advertising of food and drink high in fat, salt or sugar on television before the 9pm watershed. But the impact of such restrictions would depend on how firms change their advertising strategies following the ban.