The Effect of Singapore’s Sugar-Sweetened-Beverage Advertising Ban on Product Entry

• In Event: Dietary and Health Impacts of Nutrition Policies

Abstract

We estimate causal effects of Singapore's 2019 announcement of an advertising ban on sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs). Singapore has one of the highest diabetes prevalence rates among developed nations. With the objective of reducing sugar intake among consumers, the government of Singapore announced an advertising ban on the least healthy SSBs in October 2019. The announced ban stipulated that beverages with added sugar content beyond a threshold would no longer be allowed to be advertised in any format.  To our knowledge, the ban on sugary drinks advertising in Singapore is the first attempt of this kind by a government in its effort to reduce the presence of sugary products and sugar intake. 
In this paper, we quantify how the ban announcement affected the sugar content of newly launched products in six of the most popular SSB categories in Singapore: instant coffee, ready-to-drink (iced) tea, tea, juice, ready-to-drink (iced) coffee and soft drinks. We use detailed nutritional data from Mintel between 2016 and 2023. Mintel records details of every launch of manufactured food products in the world including sugar content in the product. 
Our methodology relies on a mix of synthetic and difference-in-differences methods. To generate our synthetic control, we choose product launches in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. We selected these countries based on proximity and because these countries did not adopt SSB policies during the study period. 
Our results show a significant impact of the advertising ban announcement in four of the six categories studied, the exception being RTD (iced) tea and tea. The average sugar content in newly launched products decreased by 37.8% in instant coffee (-2.13 gr per 100 ml with respect to a pre-treatment level of 5.63 gr per 100 ml), 23.6% in soft drinks (-1.966 gr per 100 ml with respect to a pre-treatment level of 8.33 gr per 100 ml), 20.9% in iced coffee (-1.397 gr per 100 ml with respect to a pre-treatment level of 6.69 gr per 100 ml) and 18.2% in juice (-1.47 gr per 100 ml with respect to a pre-treatment level of 8.06 gr per 100 ml). We find that the declines are driven to a greater extent by higher rates of product introduction at the low end of the sugar distribution.
This paper contributes to the literature on policies designed to improve diets, as well as to the literature on advertising, mandatory front-of-package labeling (FoPL) policy, and product reformulation. Our paper contributes to the scant empirical evidence on the supply effects of advertising bans, in particular as they pertain to product reformulation in the context of front-of-package labeling (FoPL) policies. The study has significant policy implications around the world for the fight against obesity, diabetes, and other diseases. Moreover, there is scope of future research for evaluating advertising ban impact across demographics and manufacturers' marketing strategies (including pricing strategies), all of which have significant policy implications.

Author

• Rajib Rahman, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
  Presenting Author