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Estimating treatment (or policy or intervention) effects on a single individual or unit has become increasingly important in health and biomedical sciences. One method to estimate these effects is the synthetic control method, which constructs a synthetic control, a weighted average of control units that best matches the treated unit's pre-treatment outcomes and other relevant covariates. The intervention's impact is then estimated by comparing the post-intervention outcomes of the treated unit and its synthetic control, which serves as a proxy for the counterfactual outcome had the treated unit not experienced the intervention. The augmented synthetic control method, a recent adaptation of the synthetic control method, relaxes some of the synthetic control method's assumptions for broader applicability. While synthetic controls have been used in a variety of fields, their use in public health and biomedical research is more recent, and newer methods such as the augmented synthetic control method are underutilized. This paper briefly describes the synthetic control method and its application, explains the augmented synthetic control method and its differences from the synthetic control method, and estimates the effects of an antimalarial initiative in Mozambique using both the synthetic control method and the augmented synthetic control method to highlight the advantages of using the augmented synthetic control method to analyze the impact of interventions implemented in a single region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While literature is clear on the role of finance in small business survival and growth, the relative importance of formal and informal credit in small business growth remains contentious. While earlier studies report the importance of formal credit in driving growth of firms of all sizes, recent studies find informal credit to drive the growth of only small businesses. The aim of this paper is therefore to contribute to the debate by bringing the context of four developing economies in the Southern African Developing Community (SADC) using the FinScope surveys on 10,830 Micro Small and Medium Enterprises (henceforth MSMEs). To address selection bias caused by various factors affecting small business participation in the formal/informal credit market, we used propensity score matching (PSM) where we paired small businesses from the two groups. We examined the effect of access to formal/informal credit on business performance using Average Treatment Effect (ATE) as well as Average Treatment effect on the Treated (ATT). Our results suggest that firms accessing formal credit tend to exhibit better performance in Zimbabwe but a similar performance gain was not observed in the rest of the countries. For informal credit, our results show that firms accessing informal credit tend to perform less than those without access, suggesting value depletion effect of informal credit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]