The Determinants of Infant Mortality Rate
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Date
2016
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UMT.Lahore
Abstract
The MDGs report, 2015 showed a remarkable progress in reducing the child mortality as it states that child mortality of world has dropped from 90 to 43 deaths per 1000 live births from 1990 to 2015. Despite the declining trends of child mortality in most of the regions of the world, the current situation still requires a lot to do as about 16,000 children under five in a day continue to die in 2015. This thesis is an effort to find out the robust socio economic, demographic, health and environment factors to explain the phenomenon of infant mortality rate for middle income countries by taking the data for 41 countries for 26 years (1990-2015). The Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) framework is used for estimation purpose as GMM is relatively more superior estimation technique as compare to ML, OLS, IV and TSLS. The estimation shows that the fertility rate and infant mortality rate have positive relationship as one percent increase in fertility rate results in increase in infant mortality rate by 0.3866 percent significantly. Life expectancy and infant mortality rate are inversely proportional to each other as one percent increase in life expectancy reduces the IMR by 2.6694 percent significantly. The increased health expenditures as percentage of GDP and GDP per capita also have significant impact in decreasing the infant mortality rate. The Elasticity calculated for health expenditures as percentage of GDP and real GDP per capita explains the infant mortality rate significantly by -0.1571 and -0.5881 respectively. In the post MDGs and pre SDGs scenario, the study has very important implication for planners, policy makers and international donors for having future line of action to achieve the child health related goals in SDGs 2030 agenda.