Health knowledge and smoking among South African women

While several studies of developed countries have attempted to understand individual smoking using economic models, no such studies have been conducted in South Africa. The purpose of this paper is to identify which factors influence individual South African women's choice to smoke cigarettes and their knowledge of the health risks of smoking. To allow for the implied correlation between the unobservable components of the reduced form equations for these health inputs the model is estimated as a bivariate probit. In order to identify those women who are most at risk of becoming smokers and those who are most likely to benefit from health education, the results show how the probability of being an uninformed non-smoker or an uninformed smoker vary across different socio-economic groups.