Yoon and Lam BMC Public Health 2012, 12:717 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/12/717 C O R R E S P O N D E N C E Sungwon Yoon* and Tai-Hing Lam Abstract Open Access The alcohol industry lobby and Hong Kong’s zero wine and beer tax policy Background: Whereas taxation on alcohol is becoming an increasingly common practice in many countries as part of overall public health measures, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government is bucking the trend and lowered its duties on wine and beer by 50 percent in 2007. In 2008, Hong Kong removed all duties on alcohol except for spirits. The aim of this paper is to examine the case of Hong Kong with its history of changes in alcohol taxation to explore the factors that have driven such an unprecedented policy evolution. Methods: The research is based on an analysis of primary documents. Searches of official government documents, alcohol-related industry materials and other media reports on alcohol taxation for the period from 2000 to 2008 were systematically carried out using key terms such as “alcohol tax” and “alcohol industry”. Relevant documents (97) were indexed by date and topic to undertake a chronological and thematic analysis using Nvivo8 software. Results: Our analysis demonstrates that whereas the city’s changing financial circumstances and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government’s strong propensity towards economic liberalism had, in part, contributed to such dramatic transformation, the alcohol industry’s lobbying tactics and influence were clearly the main drivers of the policy decision. The alcohol industry’s lobbying tactics were two-fold. The first was to forge a coalition encompassing a range of catering and trade industries related to alcohol as well as industry-friendly lawmakers so that these like-minded actors could find common ground in pursuing changes to the taxation policy. The second was to deliberately promote a blend of ideas to garner support from the general public and to influence the perception of key policy makers. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that the success of aggressive industry lobbying coupled with the absence of robust public health advocacy was the main driving force behind the unparalleled abolition of wine and beer duties in Hong Kong. Strong public health alliance and advocacy movement are needed to counteract the industry’s continuing aggressive lobby and promotion of alcoholic beverages. Keywords: Alcohol tax, Alcohol industry, Public health policy, Hong Kong, Political tactics Background In September 2011, the United Nations High-Level Meeting on Non-Communicable Diseases highlighted harmful use of alcohol as one of the four major risk fac- tors for non-communicable diseases [1]. Consistently ranked as one of the leading sources of disease burden, alcohol consumption is estimated to cause 2.5 million deaths each year globally [2]. Despite the alarming * Correspondence: swyoon@hku.hk Department of Community Medicine & School of Public Health, Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong, 21 Sassoon Road, Pokfulam, Hong Kong, SAR, China figures showing the negative health effects of alcohol, the global alcohol industry is continuing to rapidly ex- pand into emerging markets with few or no alcohol con- trol policies and regulations [3]. The industry has a huge capacity to market alcohol and promote drinking as part of an acceptable and “healthy” lifestyle. The potential for a rapidly growing alcohol epidemic is enormous given the increasingly ubiquitous availability of alcohol and ag- gressive promotion by the alcohol industry [4]. The World Health Organisation (WHO) suggests that alcohol taxation be a part of government efforts to regu- late alcohol consumption. Studies have shown that the © 2012 Yoon and Lam; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.