NCJ Number
173713
Journal
Journal of Drug Issues Volume: 28 Issue: 3 Dated: Summer 1998 Pages: 763-780
Date Published
1998
Length
18 pages
Annotation
This paper presents a framework for understanding and interpreting the literature on the social costs of alcohol, with emphasis on the different philosophical and practical perspectives that motivate different types of cost studies.
Abstract
The two broad motivating perspectives are the public health perspective and the economic perspective. Each perspective has several subtypes. The public health perspective emphasizes morbidity, mortality, and the overall health of populations, as well as prevention and treatment. This perspective can also include the harm reduction perspective and medical cost minimization. The economic perspective focuses on resource use, including the productivity and human capital focus and the externalities focus. Cost-of-illness studies are perhaps the best-known type of cost study and reveal large burdens to society, particularly due to lost productivity. Economic studies have also examined both the magnitude and pathways by which alcohol affects income and employment. Studies of externalities have suggested that the external costs of alcohol and greater than the tax on alcohol at the time of the research. Further research should focus on causation, the accounting of costs that are difficult to measure, the impact of the situation of consumption and not just the amount, differences in costs by socioeconomic and demographic subgroups, and the development of direct policy implications of cost studies. Notes and 45 references