The dielectric function of a charged Bose gas is determined from the response to an imposed static sinusoidal electric field. Variational and diffusion quantum Monte Carlo simulations are used to calculate the ground-state properties of the system with trial wave functions containing a parameter dependent on the amplitude and wavelength of the perturbation. The induced charge is most efficiently extracted from the difference in ground-state energies at different magnitudes of the external field, rather than directly from the expectation value of the density fluctuation operator