92441 September 2014 – Number 133 X1` The Decline of Child Mortality Rates in MENA in Comparative Perspective Farrukh Iqbal1 It is clear from the figure that all MENA countries experienced substantial declines in child mortality Introduction: Although child mortality rates have rates over the past four decades. What also stands declined all across the developing world over the out from the figure is the phenomenon of past 40 years, they have declined the most in the convergence. The gap between countries with high Middle East and North Africa region. This quick mortality rates and those with low mortality rates note documents this remarkable experience both at narrowed substantially between 1970 and 2010, the country and regional levels. suggesting the former have been converging with the latter. Figure 1 shows how child mortality rates (measured as the number of deaths of children under five years Country Specific Performance in Comparative of age per 1000 live births) have declined in the 17 Perspective: How well did each MENA country do? MENA countries for which we have data for the To identify country-specific success we need to period 1970-2010. assess each country’s performance relative to that of comparators. We define comparators as those Figure 1 countries that had a level of child mortality very similar to that of the MENA country of interest in 1970. When we carry out this empirical exercise (for details please see Farrukh Iqbal and Youssouf Kiendrebeogo, The Decline in Child Mortality in the Middle East and North Africa: A Success Story, Policy Research Working Paper 7023, World Bank, 2014), we find that all 17 MENA countries achieved either the lowest or second lowest child mortality rate among their comparators by 2010. Table 1 contains another measure of comparative performance. It provides global ranks for MENA countries in terms of the percentage reduction in child mortality achieved between 1970 and 2010. Once again, MENA countries do very well. 15 out of 17 MENA countries (all but Jordan and Iraq) are in the top half (of 165 countries worldwide) while 6 feature in the top ten. Oman and Saudi Arabia have the second and third best records for child mortality reduction in the world. 1 Chief Technical Specialist, Office of the Chief Economist, Middle East and North Africa Region. Table 1: Global rank order of MENA countries for Figure 2 reduction in child mortality Regional Performance in Comparative Perspective: We now look at cross-regional data to see how the MENA region performed against other Figure 2 graphs the relevant regional data (but at regions. Table 2 provides population weighted five year intervals). The graph confirms that the averages for child mortality rates for each of the MENA region achieved the fastest decline among all developing country regions and the OECD countries regions. It also shows two other interesting details. for 1970-2010. The table shows that the greatest First, it shows that developing regions are clustered reduction (87%) in child mortality rates occurred in in two groups, a relatively high child mortality rate the MENA region. These results are consistent with group and a relatively low rate group. MENA was the country-specific comparisons. The results are in the former cluster up to 1970, together with South even more impressive since the simple percentage Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. By 1990, it had moved reduction method of assessing performance used clearly into the lower rate cluster with East Asia, here tends to be “biased” against countries and Europe/Central Asia and Latin America. Second, regions with large initial levels of mortality. the graph shows that it was over this earlier period, between 1970 and 1990, that the MENA region Table 2 achieved the fastest decline (or greatest percentage Evolution of child mortality over time and across regions drop). After 1990, MENA’s pace of child mortality reduction slackened relative to the first period and was broadly the same as that of Latin America and East Asia. September 2014 · Number 133 2