Basic health care provision and under-5 mortality: A cross-national study of developing countries

In two cross-sections of developing countries, under-5 mortality is found to be associated strongly with maternal and infant health program effort and with the share of births attended by trained personnel, but never with any indicator of health care spending. From the standpoint of reducing under-5 mortality, then, the main challenge in many developing countries may be less to raise overall public health spending, or even the share of public health spending devoted to basic services, than to assure that a very small absolute amount of revenue is spent effectively to raise access to, or improve the quality of, maternal and infant health care. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.