The Reduction of Child Mortality in the Middle East and North Africa : A Success Story

Iqbal, Farrukh ; Kiendrebeogo, Youssouf

World Bank Group, Washington, DC

关键词: ACCESS TO FOOD;    ACCESS TO HEALTH FACILITIES;    BABY;    BASIC HEALTH;    BASIC HEALTH CARE;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-7023
RP-ID  :  WPS7023

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

Although child mortality rates havedeclined all across the developing world over the past 40years, they have declined the most in the Middle East andNorth Africa region. This paper documents this remarkableexperience and shows that it is broad based in the sensethat all countries in the Middle East and North Africaexperienced significant declines in child mortality overthis period and each country did better than most of itscomparators. In looking for the sources of the region sperformance edge, the paper confirms the importance of suchdeterminants of child mortality as income growth, educationstock, public spending on health, urbanization, and foodsufficiency. In addition, the paper establishes that theinitial level of mortality has a substantial influence onthe pace of subsequent child mortality decline. Of thesefactors, food sufficiency status is found to contribute tothe region s performance edge over all developing regions,while the other factors are found to matter to varyingdegrees in selected pairwise regional comparisons.