Countries With the Highest Alcohol Consumption

Every country with a figure for alcohol consumption, ranked from highest to lowest. The top three are Romania (16.8), Georgia (14.4) and Latvia (12.9). The middle country of the 187 has 4.3.

What this measures

Total alcohol consumption per capita (litres of pure alcohol, age 15+), in litres per adult per year. Source: World Health Organization Global Health Observatory. For this measure, no agreed better direction.

Recorded drinking plus an estimate of unrecorded drinking, per person aged fifteen and over. Ends in 2020. No "better" direction is set, and the reason is the strongest fact about this measure on the site. Of everything here, it is what most separates countries by their largest religion. Alcohol is forbidden in Islam, so a low figure in a Muslim-majority country is religious practice showing up in a health statistic. Calling that end "best" would make this site score religious practice, which it refuses to do everywhere else. Every measure of attendance, prayer, marriage and belief here has no "better" direction for exactly that reason. This is the same fact arriving through a different column. The World Health Organization is right that alcohol carries a real burden of disease, and the site does not dispute it. It declines to turn that into a score for a country, when the thing being scored would largely be how many of its people are Muslim.

The full ranking

Each country’s latest figure, from 2019–2020. The year beside each value says when it was measured.

More on alcohol consumption

• Countries With the Lowest Alcohol Consumption
• Alcohol consumption by country: trend over time and what it goes with

Related rankings

• Countries With the Highest Life Expectancy
• Countries With the Highest Infant Mortality
• Countries With the Highest Under-5 Mortality
• Countries With the Highest Health Spending
• Countries With the Highest Suicide Rates
• Countries With the Highest Hospital Beds
• Countries With the Highest Basic Water Access
• Countries With the Highest Basic Sanitation

A ranking describes countries, not the people in them, and a high or low place does not by itself say why. All country rankings.