Investigating the effects of comprehensive smoke-free legislation on neonatal and infant mortality in Thailand using the synthetic control method.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Almost all of the evidence on the benefits of smoke-free legislation on child health comes from evaluations in high-income countries. We investigated the effects of Thailand's 2010 comprehensive smoke-free legislation on neonatal and infant mortality.

Methods

To overcome some of the methodological issues inherent to traditional quasi-experimental methods, we applied the novel synthetic control approach. Using 2001-2017 country-level panel data from the World Bank and Penn World datasets, we estimated the effects of smoke-free legislation as the difference between the outcome trends in Thailand versus those in a synthetic control country. The synthetic control country was composed of 'control' middle-income countries without comprehensive smoke-free legislation to

SUBMITTER: Rado MK 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7533363 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature