Principal Investigator: Professor Franco Sassi
Funder: Public Health England
Duration: March 2021 - July 2021
Summary
This project will assess the potential value, as well as the challenges, involved in devising a fiscal policy system providing both ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ incentives across a wide range of foods and modes of access to food (for home and out-of-home consumption), and potentially using different fiscal measures to improve the nutritional quality of people’s diets in the UK. We shall focus, in particular, on the equity implications of the likely outcomes of this incentive system, for different socioeconomic and ethnic
groups. Such system would rely on the use of the FSA-NPS nutrient profile system as a basis for creating ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ price incentives through taxation levers. More specifically, we propose to do the following as part of the project:
1. Identify the practicalities, difficulties and opportunities involved in moving towards a system of price incentives based on a nutrient profiling approach;
2. Develop a price index reflecting the relative prices of foods scoring high and low according to the FSA-NPS nutrient profiling system;
3. Undertake an initial analysis of the correlation between the price index in point (b) and the nutritional quality of individual diets, measured using the same nutrient profiling approach.
Publications
Pineda E, Gressier M, Li D, Brown T, Mounsey S, Olney J, Sassi F. Effectiveness and policy implications of taxes on foods high in saturated fat, salt, and sugar. Food Policy [Under review]
3 more publications are under development.