On Thursday, June 24, 10am-1pm CET (9am - 12pm London time), the authors of Health Taxes: Policy and Practice will present their book during a hybrid launch event. The presentations will be followed by a discussion and a Q&A session during which attendees will have the opportunity to ask their question, whether they are following the event remotely or on-site.
Virtually all fiscal measures influence people’s health, through their impacts on behaviour, consumption, income and wealth. A narrow subset of fiscal measures, however, can be more directly aimed at improving health by targeting behaviours and risks that are known to be strongly associated with health outcomes.
The book Health Taxes: Policy and Practice aims to enumerate key health taxes of interest, explore their positive and negative effects, and how these effects are influenced by the design of these taxes and the context in which they are applied. We ask how and where they can be implemented. Critically, the book builds an argument for why policymakers across government should care about health taxes.
Health Taxes: Policy and Practice has been authored by the World Health Organization (WHO) and Imperial’s Centre for Health Economics & Policy Innovation (CHEPI).
This book, the product of a multi-year knowledge exchange effort led by the WHO, represents the first global in-depth treatment of health taxes as an independent domain of social policy. It attempts to address concerns by policymakers, and health and fiscal sector practitioners. The chapters have been developed by leading experts in the field of health, tax policy, public financial management, trade law and governance and have undergone peer review by experts in the academe, ministries of finance and treasury, and international organizations such as the WHO, World Bank, and the OECD.
Agenda (CET time):
10.00 - Welcome and housekeeping
10.05 - Welcome remarks from Provost at Imperial College
10.10 - Welcome remarks from the editors of the book
10.15 - Keynote from Henry Dimbleby, Independent Lead, National Food Strategy (UK)
10.45 - Chapter presentations (x4)
11.25 - Panel discussion between editors and Henry Dimbleby
11.45 - Q&A with the audience
12.15 - Networking coffee