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.
Health Taxes: Policy and Practice has been authored by Imperial’s Centre for Health Economics & Policy Innovation (CHEPI) and the World Health Organization (WHO). Written by leading academics and experts on the subject of health taxes, the book’s release is especially timely in the UK as it follows the release of the National Food Strategy (NFS) in 2021.
Agenda:
09.00 – Welcome from Professor Francisco Veloso, Dean of Imperial College Business School
09.05 – Welcome from Professor Franco Sassi, Director of Centre for Health Economics & Policy Innovation
09.10 – Welcome to the editors of the book
09.15 – Keynote from Henry Dimbleby, Independent Lead, National Food Strategy
09.45 – Author presentations
10.15 – Discussion / Q&A
11.00 – Networking coffee