Interesting article which uses terminology of health taxes for specific excise taxes rather than sin taxes!

Health taxes: missed opportunities for health and health-care financing

Helen Clark Cathrine Lofthus Robert Marten Kumanan Rasanathana

Short introduction

Every year more than 10 million people die unnecessarily from consuming tobacco, alcohol, and sugary beverages.  In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and other crises constraining fiscal space, financing for health care and social services is stagnating or facing cuts, endangering the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets. Yet, a new report from the Task Force on Fiscal Policy for Health, supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies, aiming to address the growing global burden of non-communicable diseases, shows that governments globally are missing the opportunity to implement a simple solution: a one-time tax increase on tobacco, alcohol, and sugary beverages (so-called health taxes); raising prices 50% would raise US$3•7 trillion over the next 5 years—$2•1 trillion in low-income and middle-income countries and $1•6 trillion in high-income countries. These resources could be used to invest in and realise the recent UN Summit of the Future's call to “turbo-charge” the full achievement of the SDGs before 2030.

Full article at Health taxes: missed opportunities for health and health-care financing - The Lancet Volume 404, Issue 10466p1905-1907November 16, 2024
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)02427-9/fulltext?dgcid=raven_jbs_etoc_email

The House of Lords Food, Diet and Obesity Committee demands that the Government should develop a comprehensive, integrated long-term new strategy to fix our food system, underpinned by a new legislative framework. This is the key conclusion of the Committee’s report, ‘Recipe for health: a plan to fix our broken food system’.

https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/698/food-diet-and-obesity-committee/news/203372/the-government-needs-a-plan-to-fix-our-broken-food-system-and-turn-the-tide-on-the-public-health-emergency/

Shorthand story: We need a plan to fix our broken food system
Inquiry: Food, Diet and Obesity

The report finds that obesity and diet-related disease are a public health emergency that costs society billions each year in healthcare costs and lost productivity.

Key recommendations

There is no silver bullet. As part of the new comprehensive strategy, the Government should:

•   make large food businesses report on the healthiness of their sales and exclude businesses that derive more than a defined share of sales from less healthy products from any discussions on the formation of policy on food, diet and obesity prevention.
•   give the Food Standards Agency (FSA) independent oversight of the food system.
•   introduce a salt and sugar reformulation tax on food manufacturers, building on the success of the Soft Drinks Industry Levy. The Government should consider how to use the revenue to make healthier food cheaper, particularly for people living with food insecurity.
•   ban the advertising of less healthy food across all media by the end of this Parliament, following the planned 9pm watershed and ban on paid-for online advertising in October 2025.
•   commission further research into the links between ultra-processed foods (UPFs) and adverse health outcomes and review dietary guidelines to reflect any new evidence. The rapidly growing body of epidemiological evidence showing correlation between consumption of UPFs and poor health outcomes is alarming. Beyond energy and nutrient content, causal links between other properties of UPFs and poor health outcomes have not at the present time been clearly demonstrated. To understand any links, more research is needed.
•   immediately develop an ambitious strategy for maternal and infant nutrition and drive up compliance with the school food standards. This will help break the vicious cycle by which children living with obesity are five times more likely to become adults with obesity.
•   enable auto-enrolment for Healthy Start and free school meals and review the costs and benefits to public health of increasing funding and widening eligibility for both schemes. This is essential to help families living in poverty afford healthy food and to begin closing the gaping inequalities in unhealthy diets and obesity rates.

The report notes that:

•   Two-thirds of adults are overweight and just under a third are living with obesity.
•   After tobacco, diet-related risks now make the biggest contribution to years of life lost. The annual societal cost of obesity is at least 1–2% of UK GDP.
•   Unhealthy diets are the primary driver of obesity, with people in all income groups failing to meet dietary recommendations.
•   There has been an utter failure to tackle this crisis. Between 1992 and 2020, successive governments proposed nearly 700 wide-ranging policies to tackle obesity in England, but obesity rates have continued to rise.
•   The food industry has strong incentives to produce and sell highly profitable unhealthy products. Voluntary efforts to promote healthier food have failed. Mandatory regulation has to be introduced.
•   Many people struggle to pay the bills and have neither the time nor the facilities to cook meals from scratch. Healthier food is also often more expensive than less healthy food. The report focuses on what we can do to ensure the food industry makes healthier food accessible and affordable for all.

Chair's comments
Baroness Walmsley, Chair of the Food, Diet and Obesity Committee, said:

“Food should be a pleasure and contribute to our health and wellbeing, but it is making too many people ill. Something must be going wrong if almost two in five children are leaving primary school with overweight or obesity and so many people are finding it hard to feed healthy food to their families. That is why we took a root and branch look at the food system and analysed what had gone wrong over the past few decades.

“Over the last 30 years successive governments have failed to reduce obesity rates, despite hundreds of policy initiatives. This failure is largely due to policies that focused on personal choice and responsibility out of misguided fears of the ‘nanny state’. Both the Government and the food industry must take responsibility for what has gone wrong and take urgent steps to put it right.

“We hope, given the recent comments from the Prime Minister, Lord Darzi and the Secretary of State for Health, that there is now an appetite to shift towards prevention of ill health. We urge the Government to look favourably on our plan to fix our broken food system and accept that not only is it cost-effective, but that it would lead to a lot less human misery.”

Electric Car Subsidies Are a Plus, but Could Be Improved, Study Finds
Hunt Allcott, Reigner Kane, Maximilian S. Maydanchik, Joseph S. Shapiro & Felix Tintelnot

Working Paper 33032
DOI 10.3386/w33032
Issue Date October 2024

We study electric vehicle (EV) tax credits in the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the largest climate policy in US history, with three goals. First, we provide the first ex-post microeconomic welfare analysis of this central component of the IRA. Event studies around changes in eligibility for EV tax credits find that short-run economic incidence falls largely on consumers. Additionally, domestic content restrictions on tax credits for purchased vehicles have driven enormous shifts to leasing. Our equilibrium model shows that compared to pre-IRA policy, IRA EV credits generated $1.87 of US benefits per dollar spent in 2023, at taxpayer cost of $32,000 per additional EV sold. Compared to scenarios with no EV credits, however, the IRA EV credits created only $1.02 of benefits per dollar of government spending. Second, we characterize the gains from policies targeting heterogeneity in externalities across vehicles. We find that relative to uniform credits, differentiating credits across EVs according to their heterogeneous externalities would substantially increase policy benefits. Third, we quantify tradeoffs in the IRA EV credits between foreign and domestic welfare and between trade and the environment. We find that the IRA EV credits benefit the environment but undermine trade, since they decrease global carbon emissions but use profit shifting to decrease foreign producer surplus. A controversial IRA loophole that removes domestic content restrictions on tax credits for EV leases has negative domestic benefits.


https://www.nber.org/papers/w33032

Interesting discussion about 18 minutes into BBC More or Less with Tim Harford
More or Less - How long does it take to turn around an oil tanker? - BBC Sounds
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0022skj

Global Evidence Report
A Blueprint for Better International Collaboration on Evidence
David Halpern Deelan Maru

A Blueprint for Better International Collaboration on Evidence | The Behavioural Insights Team (bi.team)
https://www.bi.team/publications/international-collaboration-evidence/

Summary
“Governments collectively spend trillions on public services. Despite this, surprisingly little is known on what works across most areas of public spending. Alongside this, R&D spending by governments across most areas of spending, with the exception of health and defence, are incredibly low. For the U.S., UK, Australia and Canada, the implied research gap is c.$100 billion per annum.
Given the scarcity of good evidence, there are enormous gains to be had from leveraging the existing evidence better, and collaborating to build more. There are overlapping common interests and questions (e.g. how best to screen cancer, the best way to teach a child to read and write, and how to reduce recidivism). This report, commissioned by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), provides a blueprint for how these overlapping interests can be jointly addressed within the global evidence ecosystem. Developed by BIT and Nesta, with participation from the U.S., UK, Australian and Canadian governments, the blueprint offers practical recommendations for improving international collaboration on evidence.

Key recommendations

Our main recommendation is for countries to collaborate on evidence synthesis. The most promising avenue for evidence synthesis is Living Evidence Reviews (LERs), which are systematic reviews that are continuously updated. We propose that ‘meta’ LERs are conducted across all areas of social policy to answer the questions that really matter to policymakers. 
“Globally, it may be helpful for countries to join forces in producing systematic reviews and identifying evidence gaps. One proposal, currently being shaped by David Halpern and Deelan Maru, proposes that a handful of likeminded governments join forces to produce better systematic reviews and avoid duplication (Halpern and Maru, 2024)… Like the Cochrane Collaboration and the Campbell Collaboration, such an approach can help expand our knowledge of what works, and put a spotlight on the areas where more evidence is needed.”
•   Establish a Shared Evaluation Fund across partner countries to ensure evaluation of promising interventions
•   Promote standardised reporting and publication protocols to facilitate inter-governmental sharing of evaluated interventions
•   Conduct evidence gap maps across priority policy areas to obtain an overarching view of the state of the evidence
•   Prioritise the synthesis of this evidence into high-quality, comprehensive reviews, or meta-Living Evidence Reviews (meta-LERs)
•   Strengthen international public service professional networks to accelerate the transfer and adoption of best practices across countries
•   Conduct research into effective translation and adoption, or ‘metascience’, to accelerate the transfer of evidence into policy and practice

Delivery options

A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) version, focusing solely on improvements to the quality of secondary evidence, could be delivered for $11-22 million. This would test the feasibility of evidence maps and meta-LERs, and establish a collaborative platform for funding. More intensive versions, allowing for improvements to primary evidence and adoption, could be delivered for $30-196m.
These amounts may seem high, but they pale in comparison to the amount spent on public services. Redirecting services to those that are proven effective through evidence would likely yield savings many times the value of the upfront investment.
This blueprint is a call to action for governments to collaborate more closely on evidence generation and utilisation. By pooling resources and expertise, countries can bridge the existing gaps in their evidence ecosystems, ultimately leading to more informed and effective public policies. This collaborative effort promises not only financial savings but also broader societal benefits through improved public service delivery.”

Over the past 30 years the IMF has adapted to global shocks and evolving member needs.

The IMF has always adapted to the evolving needs of its member countries, and the pace of change has accelerated in the past 30 years, the IMF’s Atish Rex Ghosh and Andrew Stanley write in F&D magazine’s Picture This series.

https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2024/06/Picture-This-The-Evolving-IMF?utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery