Sugar Tax Policy Dataset Data: Dataset Structure and Field Coverage

WHO Global Health Observatory Indicators is the only cross-national policy-status source in this slice. Its indicator NCD_CCS_SSBTAX - existence of a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages - holds 582 records across 194 countries for survey years 2017, 2019 and 2021. Values are categorical Yes/No strings in the Value field with ISO-3 codes in SpatialDim (the sample row reads GIN / 2019 / No), so one API call returns the whole adoption panel.

Calorie-band market shares are the cleanest exposed variable, because reformulation moves drinks between bands even when total volume holds steady. UNESDA - Soft Drinks Europe Market Data ships 29 Excel workbooks - the EU-27 aggregate plus Norway, Switzerland and the United Kingdom - each splitting soft drinks volume into no/low-calorie versus regular shares alongside million-litre volumes and litres-per-capita consumption for 2015-2025 (EU file) or 2016-2025 (most country files). Roughly 30 category-by-year series sit in each ~270 KB workbook under an 'external' edition explicitly labelled for publication with UNESDA/GlobalData citation.

Policy panels say who taxed; intake microdata says what people actually drank. CDC NHANES - Dietary Intake & Beverage Consumption Data releases two-day dietary recall files where DR1IFF_J 2017-2018 alone runs 76 MB compressed with 112,683 rows - about 32,700 of them beverages - across cycles running continuously from 1999-2000 through the August 2021-August 2023 release. Because rows carry gram weights plus derived energy, sugars and caffeine per item, pre/post comparisons of sugary-drink intake by age, sex and income are computable straight from public-use XPT files.

Expect dead ends, and know them before you budget research time. A review of UK data.gov.uk - Soft Drink Datasets found 449 results for the soft drink query, dominated by drinking-water protection zones and alcohol statistics - and no HMRC Soft Drinks Industry Levy statistics: searches for 'levy drinks', 'sugar tax' and an HMRC-filtered levy query returned Aggregates Levy and Climate Change Levy bulletins instead, with a gov.uk API search confirming the SDIL collection holds guidance documents only.

That gap pushes UK levy-era analysis onto trade-association series - the BSDA calorie split and category shares above - and onto UNESDA's United Kingdom workbook, which keeps the UK inside the European comparison despite Brexit-era reporting changes. On the industry side, American Beverage Association - Industry Data & Insights documents voluntary commitments rather than tax response: about 30 Balance Calories Initiative report PDFs spanning the 2014 baseline through 2024, produced with the Alliance for a Healthier Generation and evaluator Keybridge, published as PDF and HTML rather than machine-readable files.

This page covers the policy-adoption layer. For the wider toolset across the same industry - pricing, consumption, market sizing and formulation data - start from the soft drinks non alcoholic beverages data guide. Two sibling posts extend adjacent layers: soda price history time series for the long-run CPI price work behind pre-post designs, and sugar sweetened beverage consumption data for the NHANES intake side of the outcome model.