Alcohol and Tobacco Consumption in UK during COVID-19

Alcohol and tobacco consumption is a serious issue which dramatically endangers individuals’ health. Moreover, these unhealthy behaviors can be affected by the financial difficulties related to periods of economic recessions. Coronavirus pandemic outbreak completely overthrew the worldwide reality, and it led to major issues in practically any field of human existence, but most of all it affected people’s health and personal finance. This situation translated in major changes in tobacco and alcohol consumption. The study investigates the effects of COVID-19 on smoking and drinking habits of UK people during April 2020 (first Wave of epidemic). The dataset employed to perform the analysis is derived from the “Understanding Society COVID 2020” survey conducted by the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) at the University of Essex, and the Kantar Public and NatCen, and builds upon the “UK Household Longitudinal Study”. Three main aspects have been considered: the effect of COVID-19 on drinking; the effect of COVID-19 on smoking and the interdependence between drinking and smoking during the pandemic. The model employed to conduct the analysis is the Bivariate Probit model, which allowed to study the mutual effect of smoking on drinking. The main results are based on the estimations obtained from the regression and on the descriptive statistics undertake before running the model, and are compared to the existing literature concerning the effects of economic crisis-related financial difficulties on liquor and tobacco consumption. The key variables are the dependent variables smoker and drinker and the explanatory variables bills down and unemployment, indicating the inability to afford bills and the state of unemployment of individuals respectively. As to the drinking behavior, we found a negative effect of being unemployed and having budgetary issues on the prevalence of drinking, which is consistent with the “income-effect” hypothesis by Bor et al. 2013 and De Goeij et al. 2015. The smoking prevalence instead seems to be positively affected by financial difficulties related to COVID-19, sustaining the idea that smoking is a way to cope with the distress deriving from economic recessions (Gallus et al. 2013; Mattei et al. 2017; Keiser et al. 2017). 5 Finally, in regard to the interdependence between smoking and drinking, a substitutability relationship between alcohol and tobacco consumption has been identified: one good is consumed to deal with the absence of the other. This last finding is in line with the results presented by Goel and Morey (1995) and later by McLellan et al. (2012) and Tauchmann et al. (2012).