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

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  • Farrukh Iqbal
  • Youssouf Kiendrebeogo

Abstract

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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  • Farrukh Iqbal & Youssouf Kiendrebeogo, "undated". "The Reduction of Child Mortality in the Middle East and North Africa: A Success Story," Economics Working Papers 20-06/2014, School of Business Administration, American University of Sharjah.
    • Handle: RePEc:sha:ecowps:20-06/2014
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    Cited by:

    1. Elena Ianchovichina & Lili Mottaghi & Shantayanan Devarajan, "undated". "Middle East and North Africa Economic Monitor, October 2015," World Bank Publications - Reports 22711, The World Bank Group.
    2. Shantayanan Devarajan, 2018. "How to Use Oil Revenues Efficiently," Working Papers 1199, Economic Research Forum, revised 24 May 2018.
    3. Kamal Kasmaoui, 2020. "What makes Moroccans happy: A micro-data study," Working Papers hal-02956855, HAL.
    4. Taleb Awad-Warrad & Buthaina M. A. Muhtaseb, 2017. "Trade Openness and Inclusive Economic Growth: Poverty Reduction through the Growth Unemployment Linkage," International Journal of Economics and Financial Issues, Econjournals, vol. 7(2), pages 348-354.
    5. Efstratia Arampatzi & Martijn Burger & Elena Ianchovichina & Tina Röhricht & Ruut Veenhoven, 2018. "Unhappy Development: Dissatisfaction With Life on the Eve of the Arab Spring," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 64(s1), pages 80-113, October.

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