"Sin taxes" as a means for orienting consumers' behaviour between health care policies and tax concerns

Fighting against sin has recently reached a new dimension: worldwide, policy makers have started to evaluate potential benefits of imposing taxes on specific behaviours and goods thought to be harmful to society, in order to discourage their enacting and consumption. In the last decades the so-called “sin taxes”, usually structured as excise taxes, have flourished in European countries as well as in the Us and have been chiefly designed to address socially undesirable activities: the ever expanding list of taxable sins now includes tobacco, fatty foods, high-sugar-content foods and beverages and many other similar products.