Infant Mortality
One of the happiest trends of the first years of this century has been a dramatic decline in infant mortality. In 2013, approximately 6.3m children under the age of five died around the world, down from 9.7m in 2000. Achieving a two-thirds decline from 1990 mortality rates (when 12.7m children aged five or under died) was one of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of eight development targets for 2015 approved at a UN summit in 2000. Working out the extent to which the MDGs were responsible for this decline has become a big part of the debate over whether they were a success or not. The main difficulty is to guess what would have happened had the MDGs not been set; during the 1990s, the number of child deaths was already falling steeply.
