Эффективность мер антиалкогольной кампании в России в 2000-2014гг.

Excessive drinking and high mortality rate has been a critical problems since the formation of the Russian Federation in 1992. Thus, drastic measures are necessary to overcome the crisis. Recent regulatory innovations fit within this requirement yet their effect is ambiguous. In this paper we aim to give assessment to the most pronounced recent innovations that were supposed to change the market for alcohol in Russia. The period of interest is 2000-Q2 2014, when the most radical restrictions on the alcohol market were imposed. The ultimate goal of this study is to give justification for the future course of anti-alcohol actions. In this work we analyze unique dataset. We extract data on alcohol consumption from representative samples for 18 cities. It enables us to make inference about alcohol consumption on the city level and take into account consumption of illegal drinks. Our main analytical tool is panel regression. We apply Fixed Effects and Arellano-Bond estimators to find out what factors drove alcohol consumption. Finally, we estimate panel VAR to capture interconnection between consumption of various types of alcohol. We found evidence that both monetary and most restrictive regulatory innovations did not have the desired effect. Nevertheless, there was one policy innovation that reduced consumption of alcohol – ban on advertising beer on TV that was introduced in 2004. Therefore, we conclude that government can fight alcoholism, but it should be very selective in what measures to implement. We make two conclusions. First - monetary measures must be accompanied by strict control from the side of state watchdogs. Second - the most efficient way to fight alcoholism is to persuade people that alcohol is harmful and there are many other ways to enjoy life apart from drunkenness.