Under-Five Mortality Rate 1998

Report year 1998·Data year 1998

Deaths before age five (per 1,000 live births)·Higher is worse — rank 1 is worst affected·Published by UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME)

73 reference years (1952–2024), covering 81 to 200 economies — the longest continuous series on this site — from the UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation, read from UNICEF’s own SDMX data warehouse (CME_MRY0T4), which childmortality.org names as its source data. How many children out of every thousand born alive die before their fifth birthday. It is the single measure that most cleanly separates the 1950s from now: the worst reading in the file is 781 per 1,000 and the best is 1.26. ⚠ Re-sourced 2026-09-09: until then this series came through the World Bank’s indicator API, which re-publishes IGME’s estimates rounded to ONE decimal — 196 countries shared 157 distinct values, and every apparent tie was the Bank’s rounding. Read from UNICEF directly the estimates carry full precision (200 distinct values across 200 economies in 2024), the 90% uncertainty bounds IGME publishes with each one, and four territories the Bank drops. ⚠ MODELLED estimates, fitted to whatever censuses, surveys and vital registration a country has — which is why every country has a figure for every year, and why each carries the uncertainty the bounds now show. ⚠ These are not 73 published reports — every annual IGME release re-estimates the whole series, so `restatedByReport` names the release. The group does not rank countries, so no rank is stored in the data; the POSITION shown on the statistics page is derived here by ordering the published estimate.

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