Effect of the Quebec Ad Ban on Junk Food Expenditure
Abstract
With growing concern about childhood obesity and associated health risks, several countries are considering banning food advertising directed to children. In 1980, the Canadian province of Quebec imposed a ban on advertising to children under the age of 13. In this paper, we look at whether the advertising ban affected consumer food choice in Quebec. To the best of our knowledge this will be the first study to explore the effect of the Quebec ban on expenditure.
Using data from the Canadian household expenditure survey and Canada Foodex survey from 1984 to 1992, we ask whether expenditure on fast food is lower in those groups affected by the ban compared to those who are not. Following Goldberg (1990) we control for mother tongue as native english speakers have access to more sources of media from outside Quebec than those families who speak French or other languages. Unlike Goldberg, we use a difference-in-difference methodology across several dimensions, holding family characteristics such as income, education and immigrant status constant. First, we test whether expenditure on fast food by French-speaking families with kids in Quebec differs more markedly than expenditure by English-speaking families in Quebec compared to their English and French-speaking counterparts in Ontario. We also compare consumption of those families whose first language is neither French nor English to Anglophones in the two provinces. Further, given the ban is directed to children, we estimate the effect of the ban by testing the difference in expenditure between households with children and those without in Quebec versus Ontario.
Our second approach is to estimate the effect of the ban by matching households with similar characteristics across Ontario and Quebec. Using both methodologies, we find that for fast food, the primary effect of the ban is to reduce the probability of purchasing fast food as opposed to affecting the amount spent when the family was already in the restaurant. Although we cannot test the effect of the ban directly, we find a miriad of evidence that indicates that the ban had an effect on the number of fast food meals purchased.