A comparison of empirical models on determinants of infant mortality: a cross-national study on Africa.

The goal of achieving health for all by the year 2000 has instigated numerous studies on the determinants of health. In this paper, we re-evaluate two models in which infant mortality--across twenty-eight low- and middle-income African states--is explained by socioeconomic, demographic, medical, environmental and political factors. The results indicate that the GNP per capita, school population as a percentage of the population under 19, population density and the percentage of the population with access to health care together explained 80% of the variations in infant mortality in the sample study. Apart from the GNP per capita and the school population as a percentage of the population under 19 which were negative and statistically significant, variables of importance for health policy, e.g. female literacy rate, water supply, food aid, calorie supply, health care expenditure and the degree of urbanization carried a negative sign but were nonsignificant. We interpreted the above thus: a reduction in infant mortality is feasible only with changes on diverse fronts rather than by marginal improvements in a few determining factors. A comparative test of the replicated model and our proposed model has shown that our model produced a better theoretical and statistical fitting than did the replicated model.