In 2019 and 2020, according to preliminary data by the World Health Organization (WHO), which are currently being sent out to all Member States for confirmation and validation, the Baltic countries and Poland all had a level of adult alcohol per capita (APC) consumption that placed them among the top 20 countries globally (World Health Organization, 2022a, World Health Organization, 2022b); see also (Rehm et al., 2021a). However, over the last two decades, the APC trends in these four countries have developed differently. For all four countries, APC increased between 2000 and 2005. Thereafter, consumption continued to increase in Poland (overall increase between 2000 and 2020 of about 17 %). For the Baltic countries, the trends were more varied, with both Estonia and Lithuania reducing consumption between 2014 and the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic (i.e., 2020; see Fig. 1 and Appendix Table A1).

Alcohol control policies are often cited as being responsible for these fluctuations (e.g., (Rehm et al., 2021b, 2019), but there are few studies which have empirically examined this claim, in part because APC data are collected on a yearly basis, and time series are often not of long enough duration to perform proper statistical analyses at a country level (Beard et al., 2019, Jiang et al., 2022). However, combining data from four countries would provide 84 observations, and if the alcohol control policies can be classified similarly across countries, such a dataset may serve as a basis for statistical analyses.

Thus, as part of a larger project, we set out to classify alcohol control policies based on a common metric, and to examine whether APC changed after the implementation of such policies (Rehm et al., 2021b, Kilian et al., 2022). The basic hypothesis was that, irrespective of country and year, implementation of taxation increases high enough to reduce affordability, or of availability restrictions which reduced trade hours for alcoholic beverages by at least 20 %, would be associated with immediate APC decreases. These alcohol control policies represent two of the WHO’s three “best buys” for alcohol with immediate effects (for descriptions and explanations (World Health Organization, 2017); for empirical demonstration of effectiveness and cost-effectiveness (Chisholm et al., 2018)). As for restrictions in advertising and marketing (the third “best buy”), we postulate a mid- to long-term effect (Babor et al., forthcoming).