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Comment by spurgu | Hacker News Reader

Not sure what you mean by "success"? In Finland at least so many people (especially from the south) regularly (pre-COVID at least) take the ferry to Estonia to buy alcohol in bulk because of the insanely high alcohol taxes. If that option didn't exist I'd expect moonshine (and/or illegal exports) to become much more common.

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Folks in Norway would go to Sweden pre-COVID to buy alcohol. The in-country alcohol sales rose enough post-covid that the government is actually lowering the taxes on alcohol slightly, though whether it is enough to keep folks buying in Norway is debatable. I'd not be surprised if there wasn't a thriving black market even with all this.

A few years ago the government in Estonia raised taxes a bit too much on alcohol. The result was that Estonians started going to Latvia to buy alcohol. I believe even a lot of Finns are (or were) now buying alcohol from Latvia. Even alcohol that's made in Estonia is cheaper in Latvia.

There were some additional effects to this as well. Food is also cheaper in Latvia. Some people ended up doing a lot of their grocery shopping in Latvia as, because they were already there for be alcohol.

Politically, the Social Democrats got most of the blame for the tax increase. They had a large drop in votes in the most recent parliamentary election.

Thanks for the details/clarifications! I haven't lived in Finland for a couple of years so haven't really stayed up to date.

See https://ourworldindata.org/alcohol-consumption#historical-pe...

Seems like people in Nordic countries (especially when not considering Denmark) consume less alcohol than their neighbours, although the difference has been decreasing.

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