AUTHOR=Ferretti Fabrizio , Mariani Michele , Sarti Elena TITLE=Testing Club Convergence in Female Smoking Prevalence JOURNAL=Frontiers in Global Women's Health VOLUME=3 YEAR=2022 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/global-womens-health/articles/10.3389/fgwh.2022.875813 DOI=10.3389/fgwh.2022.875813 ISSN=2673-5059 ABSTRACT=

In this paper, we applied the concept of convergence to examine the evolution of smoking prevalence among women in 191 countries worldwide from 1990 to 2019. First, the non-linear time-varying factor model proposed by Phillips and Sul was adopted to identify potential clusters (clubs), wherein groups of countries converge to similar female smoking rates. Second, an ordered logit regression model was used to assess the impact of cigarette affordability on the probability of falling within a given cluster. The hypothesis of global convergence was rejected. However, the clustering algorithm successfully identified five and nine clubs, within countries with increasing and decreasing smoking prevalence, respectively. A higher relative income-price ratio (i.e., lower cigarette affordability) increased the likelihood of belonging to a club of countries with a low prevalence of female tobacco smoking.