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Data

Share of population who haver never drunk alcohol

What you should know about this indicator

How is this data described by its producer?

Rationale

Aggregate measures such as APC only give population averages. In order to better understand alcohol consumption, we need to combine this information with other information on who drinks and in what pattern. The number of lifetime abstainers provides such information by separating out the drinking from the non-drinking population.

Definition

Lifetime abstainers is defined as the proportion of adults (15+ years) in a given population who have not consumed any alcohol during their lifetime, assessed at a given point in time. Numerator: The number of lifetime abstainers (15+ years). Denominator: The total number of participants (15+ years) responding to the corresponding question in a given survey. Weighted by survey design.

Method of measurement

A representative sample of the adult population (15+ years) of the country is asked to answer questions in a survey. The first priority in the decision tree is given to international surveys (in this order of preference: WHS, STEPS, GENACIS, and ECAS); second is national surveys.

Method of estimation

Statistical analyses based on surveys, weighted to be representative for the population.

Share of population who haver never drunk alcohol
Lifetime abstainers is defined as the proportion of adults (15+ years) in a given population who have not consumed any alcohol during their lifetime, assessed at a given point in time. Numerator: The number of lifetime abstainers (15+ years). Denominator: The total number of participants (15+ years) responding to the corresponding question in a given survey. Weighted by survey design.
Source
World Health Organization - Global Health Observatory (2025) – processed by Our World in Data
Last updated
May 19, 2025
Next expected update
May 2026
Date range
2000–2020
Unit
%

Related research and writing

A dark blue background with a lighter blue world map superimposed over it. Yellow text that says Alcohol Consumption by Our World in Data

Alcohol Consumption

Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

World Health Organization – Global Health Observatory

The GHO data repository is WHO's gateway to health-related statistics for its 194 Member States. It provides access to over 1000 indicators on priority health topics including mortality and burden of diseases, the Millennium Development Goals (child nutrition, child health, maternal and reproductive health, immunization, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, neglected diseases, water and sanitation), non communicable diseases and risk factors, epidemic-prone diseases, health systems, environmental health, violence and injuries, equity among others.

Retrieved on
May 19, 2025
Retrieved from
https://www.who.int/data/gho
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
World Health Organization. 2025. Global Health Observatory data repository. http://www.who.int/gho/en/.

The GHO data repository is WHO's gateway to health-related statistics for its 194 Member States. It provides access to over 1000 indicators on priority health topics including mortality and burden of diseases, the Millennium Development Goals (child nutrition, child health, maternal and reproductive health, immunization, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, neglected diseases, water and sanitation), non communicable diseases and risk factors, epidemic-prone diseases, health systems, environmental health, violence and injuries, equity among others.

Retrieved on
May 19, 2025
Retrieved from
https://www.who.int/data/gho
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
World Health Organization. 2025. Global Health Observatory data repository. http://www.who.int/gho/en/.

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Share of population who haver never drunk alcohol”. Our World in Data (2026). Data adapted from World Health Organization. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/share-of-population-who-never-drink-alcohol.html [online resource] (archived on March 4, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

World Health Organization - Global Health Observatory (2025) – processed by Our World in Data

Full citation

World Health Organization - Global Health Observatory (2025) – processed by Our World in Data. “Share of population who haver never drunk alcohol” [dataset]. World Health Organization, “Global Health Observatory” [original data]. Retrieved April 1, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/share-of-population-who-never-drink-alcohol.html (archived on March 4, 2026).

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Data API

Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.

Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-who-never-drink-alcohol.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-who-never-drink-alcohol.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-who-never-drink-alcohol.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-who-never-drink-alcohol.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-who-never-drink-alcohol.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-who-never-drink-alcohol.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-who-never-drink-alcohol.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-who-never-drink-alcohol.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear