The Reduction of Child Mortality in the Middle East and North Africa : A Success Story
Although child mortality rates have declined all across the developing world over the past 40 years, they have declined the most in the Middle East and North Africa region. This paper documents this remarkable experience and shows that it is broad...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Policy Research Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank Group, Washington, DC
2014
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2014/09/20174120/reduction-child-mortality-middle-east-north-africa-success-story http://hdl.handle.net/10986/20337 |
| Summary: | Although child mortality rates have
declined all across the developing world over the past 40
years, they have declined the most in the Middle East and
North Africa region. This paper documents this remarkable
experience and shows that it is broad based in the sense
that all countries in the Middle East and North Africa
experienced significant declines in child mortality over
this period and each country did better than most of its
comparators. In looking for the sources of the region s
performance edge, the paper confirms the importance of such
determinants of child mortality as income growth, education
stock, public spending on health, urbanization, and food
sufficiency. In addition, the paper establishes that the
initial level of mortality has a substantial influence on
the pace of subsequent child mortality decline. Of these
factors, food sufficiency status is found to contribute to
the region s performance edge over all developing regions,
while the other factors are found to matter to varying
degrees in selected pairwise regional comparisons. |
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