What would government regulation of food, alcohol, vaping, tobacco and soft drinks look like in a more liberal Britain? There would be a lot less of it, naturally, but there would not be none. An ultra-libertarian approach would be to remove all sin taxes, abolish all health warnings, legalise...

Since 2015, the UK government has worked with the food industry to reformulate a wide range of food products to reduce sugar, fat and calorie content. The industry has been given the target of lowering the number of calories in certain products by 20% by 2025. The reformulation scheme was...

A new IEA publication explores the case for deregulating the gambling marketExecutive summary:The 2005 Gambling Act was intended to modernise gambling in the United Kingdom by replacing the anachronistic 1968 Gaming Act with legislation better suited to the twenty-first century. The 1968 Act had...

Mancur Olson explained in The Logic of Collective Action (1965) that the free rider problem and the paradox of participation discourage rational consumers from taking collective action to oppose policies that disadvantage them. The lack of grassroots opposition to 'nanny state' policies from...

It is widely believed that healthy eating is relatively expensive whereas 'junk food' is relatively cheap. This has led to an assumption that poor diets and obesity are directly caused by economic deprivation. Some studies have compared the price-per-calorie of various types of food. The...

This discussion paper revisits the issue of state-funded activism in the UK and EU. It starts with the hypothesis that there has been a decline in taxpayers' money given to political advocacy groups because (1) budget cuts under 'austerity' have made less money available to non-governmental...

It's time for a radical overhaul of state-funded charitiesNew research, released today, reveals the true extent of government funded lobbying by charities and pressure groups.This report argues that, when government funds the lobbying of itself, it is subverting democracy and debasing the...

Minimum unit pricing (MUP) sets a floor price on a unit of alcohol to prevent the sale of 'cheap' drinks, with the aim of reducing alcohol related harm. MUP was introduced in Scotland on 1 May 2018 at 50p per unit. This study estimates the financial cost to consumers in the four years since...