Recent Infant Mortality Trends in Central America

Stephen D. McCracken, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
Paul Stupp, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

This paper evaluates how socioeconomic, demographic and health services are associated with infant mortality levels in four Central American countries (El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua), and assesses how these factors have affected recent trends. Data for the analysis are from RHS / DHS surveys of the early 1990s, and early 2000s. Logistics regression analysis is used to access the relative importance of factors for each period and country to better understand variations in the "sociodemographic cause of death structure" and to appreciate how these factors vary overtime and among neighboring countries. Decomposition techniques are applied to evaluate the relative contribution of each set of factors in each country's recent mortality decline. The series of standardizations provide an estimate of percent contribution of factors in the model, as well as an estimate of contributions due to changes in the "cause structure of death" and other changes outside the model.