Sugar-sweetened beverage taxation and dental therapy treatment volume in Botswana health facilities: a computed-control estimation of price-exposure thresholds

Sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) taxation is widely promoted as a population-level caries-prevention instrument, yet the dental-therapy workload consequences of price exposure remain unquantified for African health systems. The 16 country-survey observations yielded a mean of 32.037 (SD 8.479), with Mozambique lowest at 20.40 and Kenya highest at 49.10. The framework specifies a donor pool of untreated countries, a price-exposure index derived from excise pass-through, and a threshold model in which treatment volume responds non-linearly once exposure exceeds a policy-relevant cut-point. The contribution is methodological: it converts a diffuse policy debate into an estimable threshold parameter, identifies the data infrastructure Botswana would need to populate it, and shows why the absence of harmonised SSB consumption and dental-therapy utilisation series currently prevents credible causal claims. Threshold estimation, not average-effect estimation, is the appropriate target for a tax whose clinical yield depends on the distribution of exposure across the child population.