Health or Wealth? Economic Crisis and Alcohol Consumption

This work is devoted to the study of the impact of the economic crisis on alcohol consumption in Russia. It's a first time when an attempt to asses the impact of macroeconomic dynamics (in particular, unemployment) on alcohol consumption at the micro level was made, for which the RLMS-HSE microdata for 2006-2015 and the Rosstat macro data on unemployment by regions and alcohol prices for the same period were combined. In the course of the work, literature on alcohol consumption in Russia and in the world was studied and analyzed; in particular, literature review of the impact of the economic crisis on alcohol consumption in the American and European regions are presented. In order to assess the impact of the crisis on alcohol consumption in Russia the main hypothesis was formulated. The hypothesis state as follows: the period of the economic crisis adversely affects alcohol consumption, that is, alcohol consumption is procyclical and decreases during the economic downturn. As a result of the analysis it was found that the unemployment rate and the economic dynamics are linked procyclically. That is, during the economic downturn, assosiated by an increase in the unemployment rate, alcohol consumption falls.