The unprecedented reduction in the tax on alcoholic beverages, which took effect on Monday, means that strong spirits are now cheaper than ever, when measured against average earnings.

   

Last week, an average male worker in an industrial job would have to work just over an hour to earn enough for a bottle of Koskenkorva neutral spirits. After the latest price cut, the same bottle can be bought with just 42 minutes' wages. In the 1960s a worker had to work for more than three hours to earn the price of a bottle of Koskenkorva.

The first day of lower alcohol prices did not bring any massive rush to retail outlets of the Finnish alcohol monopoly Alko.

   

Mika-Pekka Miettinen, head of communications at Alko, says that the lower prices have brought some more people, but no huge crowds.

   

The sales outlet in Tornio, on the border with Sweden, had a fairly busy day. Finnish alcohol prices have been somewhat cheaper than those in Sweden for some time now, and sales clerk Raija Lunk at the Tornio Alko said that the new lower prices seemed to attract even more cross-border traffic than usual.

One of the key aims of the tax cut was to pre-empt a rush of alcohol tourism to Estonia when that country joins the European Union two months from now. When that happens, the present restrictions on personal imports of alcohol from Estonia will be lifted.

   

However, the availability of cheaper alcohol at home did not seem to have an inhibiting effect on purchases made by Finns visiting Estonia by boat. Customs officials at the Port of Helsinki reported that travellers seemed to be bringing in their full duty free quotas off the ships from Tallinn just like before.

Commenting on the decision to cut alcohol taxation, Jussi Huttunen, editor-in-chief of the Finnish medical journal Duodecim and former director-general of the Finnish Public Health Institute, says that the decision to cut the alcohol tax was a difficult compromise.

   

Although he readily concedes that the likely increase in alcohol consumption will have negative consequences for public health, including a 20% increase in alcohol-related deaths, Huttunen says that the alternatives seemed worse: a loss of tax revenue, an increase in black market sales, and an increase in consumption.

   

Huttunen says that if there had been no tax cut, southern Finland would probably be getting most of its alcohol from Estonia.

   

"When someone brings home a ten-litre container of strong vodka, for instance, it would end up being consumed more quickly than if it were available in smaller amounts at a time."

   

Huttunen sees the situation as similar to the one that prevailed in 1969 when medium-strength beer was allowed into ordinary grocery stores. "In spite of the calculations, we were not able to estimate the growth in consumption in advance. It proved to be much greater than expected", Huttunen says.

   

He adds that the atmosphere in Finland has changed in recent years: people are more concerned than before about the harmful effects of alcohol.