Every Monday our authors provide a round-up of some of the most recently published peer reviewed articles from the field. We don’t cover everything, or even what’s most important – just a few papers that have interested the author. Visit our Resources page for links to more journals or follow the HealthEconBot. If you’d like to write one of our weekly journal round-ups, get in touch.
The effect of spending cuts on teen pregnancy. Journal of Health Economics [PubMed] Published July 2017
High teenage pregnancy rates are an important concern that features high in many countries’ social policy agendas. In the UK, a country which has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the world, efforts to tackle the issue have been spearheaded by the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy, an initiative aiming to halve under-18 pregnancy rates by offering access to sex education and contraception. However, the recent spending cuts have led to reductions in grants to local authorities, many of which have, in turn, limited or cut a number of teenage pregnancy-related programmes. This has led to vocal opposition by politicians and organisations, who argue that cuts jeopardise the reductions in teenage pregnancy rates seen in previous years. In this paper, Paton and Wright set out to examine whether this is the case; that is, whether cuts to Teenage Pregnancy Strategy-related services have had an impact on teenage pregnancy rates. To do so, the authors used panel data from 149 local authorities in England collected between 2009 and 2014. To capture changes in teenage pregnancy rates across local authorities over the specified period, the authors used a fixed effects model which assumed that under-18 conception rates are a function of annual expenditure on teenage pregnancy services per 13-17 year female in the local authority, and a set of other socioeconomic variables acting as controls. Area and year dummies were also included in the model to account for unobservable effects that relate to particular years and localities and a number of additional analysis were run to get around spurious correlations between expenditure and pregnancy rates. Overall, findings showed that areas which implemented bigger cuts to teenage pregnancy-targeting programmes have, on average, seen larger drops in teenage pregnancy rates. However, these drops are, in absolute terms, small (e.g. a 10% reduction in expenditure is associated with a 0.25% decrease in teenage conception rates). Various explanations can be put forward to interpret these findings, one of which is that cuts might have trimmed off superfluous or underperforming elements of the programme. If this is the case, Paton and Wright’s findings offer some support to arguments that spending cuts may not always be bad for the public.
Young adults’ experiences of neighbourhood smoking-related norms and practices: a qualitative study exploring place-based social inequalities in smoking. Social Science & Medicine [PubMed] Published September 2017
Smoking is a universal problem affecting millions of people around the world and Canada’s young adults are no exception. As in most countries, smoking prevalence and initiation is highest amongst young groups, which is bad news, as many people who start smoking at a young age continue to smoke throughout adulthood. Evidence suggests that there is a strong socioeconomic gradient in smoking, which can be seen in the fact that smoking prevalence is unequally distributed according to education and neighbourhood-level deprivation, being a greater problem in more deprived areas. This offers an opportunity for local-level interventions that may be more effective than national strategies. Though, to come up with such interventions, policy makers need to understand how neighbourhoods might shape, encourage or tolerate certain attitudes towards smoking. To understand this, Glenn and colleagues saw smoking as a practice that is closely related to local smoking norms and social structures, and sought to get young adult smokers’ views on how their neighbourhood affects their attitudes towards smoking. Within this context, the authors carried out a number of focus groups with young adult smokers who lived in four different neighbourhoods, during which they asked questions such as “do you think your neighbourhood might be encouraging or discouraging people to smoke?” Findings showed that some social norms, attitudes and practices were common among neighbourhoods of the same SES. Participants from low-SES neighbourhoods reported more tolerant and permissive local smoking norms, whereas in more affluent neighbourhoods, participants felt that smoking was more contained and regulated. While young smokers from high SES neighbourhoods expressed some degree of alignment and agency with local smoking norms and practices, smokers in low SES described smoking as inevitable in their neighbourhood. Of interest is how individuals living in different SES areas saw anti-smoking regulations: while young smokers in affluent areas advocate social responsibility (and downplay the role of regulations), their counterparts in poorer areas called for more protection and spoke in favour of greater government intervention and smoking restrictions. Glenn and colleagues’ findings serve to highlight the importance of context in designing public health measures, especially when such measures affect different groups in entirely different ways.
Cigarette taxes, smoking—and exercise? Health Economics [PubMed] Published August 2017
Evidence suggests that rises in cigarette taxes have a positive effect on smoking reduction and/or cessation. However, it is also plausible that the effect of tax hikes extends beyond smoking, to decisions about exercise. To explore whether this proposition is supported by empirical evidence, Conway and Niles put together a simple conceptual framework, which assumes that individuals aim to maximise the utility they get from exercise, smoking, health (or weight management) and other goods subject to market inputs (e.g. medical care, diet aids) and time and budget constraints. Much of the data for this analysis came from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) in the US, which includes survey participants’ demographic characteristics (age, gender), as well as answers to questions about physical activities and exercise (e.g. intensity and time per week spent on activities) and smoking behaviour (e.g. current smoking status, number of cigarettes smoked per day). Survey data were subsequently combined with changes in cigarette taxes and other state-level variables. Conway and Niles’s results suggest that increased cigarette costs reduce both smoking and exercise, with the decline in exercise being more pronounced among heavy and regular smokers. However, the direction of the effect varied according to one’s age and smoking experience (e.g. higher cigarette cost increased physical activity among recent quitters), which highlights the need for caution in drawing conclusions about the exact mechanism that underpins this relationship. Encouraging smoking cessation and promoting physical exercise are important and desirable public health objectives, but, as Conway and Niles’s findings suggest, pursuing both of them at the same time may not always be plausible.
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