The Incidence of Sin Taxes: Evidence from Italy

The term “sin goods” is used to identify goods or services whose consumption can be considered self-destructive for individuals and source of negative externalities for the entire society. The potentially harmful nature of sin goods makes these categories of products subject to special fiscal rules. The regulation of sin goods markets in Italy deeply changed over the last 15 years, and it has now reached a particularly complex and potential unfair taxation system. In this paper, we analyse the fairness of the Italian taxation system applied to sin goods in order to measure their economic incidence. After investigating the Italian taxation on sin goods, we analyze and compare their degree of regressivity using data of the Italian Household Budget Survey (HBS). Results show that, among “sin taxes”, gambling taxes can be considered the most regressive form of taxation, followed by cigarettes and beer.