Daily chart: Saving the children

WORLD leaders are currently gathered in New York for the annual meeting of the United Nation's General Assembly. One of the foremost items on the agenda will be the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the successors to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of global targets ending in 2015. One of the main MDGs was to reduce the global mortality rate of children under five-years-old by two-thirds from its 1990 level of 91 deaths per 1,000 live births, to 30 in 2015. The subsequent SDG is to reduce this still further, to 25 deaths by 2030.A clutch of reports published this month by the UN's group on child mortality estimation, UNICEF and the Lancet present a somewhat mixed picture. The mortality rate worldwide has fallen by 53%, to 43 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2015, missing the global target. Yet there are many reasons for cheer. Substantial progress is being made at regional and national level. Of 195 countries, 64 have met the MDG target, and 24 of these are low or lower-middle income countries. In two regions of the world, East Asia & the Pacific and Latin America & the Caribbean, the goal was surpassed earlier than 2015. East Asia's success is driven by China, the best performer in the region, where the rate fell by 80%. Peru achieved a similarly remarkable reduction. And even in sub-Saharan Africa, where child …
Source: The Economy