Best practice in estimating the costs of alcohol – Recommendations for future studies

This report aims to summarize best practice in estimating the attributable and avoidable costs of alcohol,

and to make recommendations for making such estimates in future studies. It discusses the conceptual

basis for such cost studies, and then goes through the conceptual and methodological challenges for each

type of cost in turn. It recommends (i) changes in the terminology used; (ii) the consistent and explicit

consideration of ‘external’ costs (i.e. costs to others); (iii) more sophisticated modelling of the effect of

policy interventions on costs; (iv) more robust attempts to quantify alcohol’s causal effect on harms and

costs; (v) a demonstration project using new methodologies; (vi) the use of scenarios rather than existing

sensitivity analyses; (vii) importing data from other studies rather than simply missing out certain types of

cost; (viii) taking account of future health and resource costs; and (ix) not using the ‘human capital’

method for valuing the labour costs of premature mortality within the main estimates.