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INFANT MORTALITY AND THE SOCIOECONOMIC CONDITIONS IN THE CEE COUNTRIES AFTER 1990
Mircea Asandului, Carmen Pintilescu, Danut Jemna, Daniela Viorica

ABSTRACT.Infant mortality is an indicator of the population's health and of the degree of economic development. It is a sensitive indicator to changes in environmental, social and economical conditions and is commonly used to express the degree of overall development of a society or a country's quality of life. In CEE countries, infant mortality, although it decreased in the past 20 years, is still high compared to other EU countries, since there are groups of countries with specific issues and for which it reflects the state of their economic and social development. One of EU goals is to reduce the level of this indicator and CEE countries must make a concerted effort in this regard. The paper's objective is the empirical evaluation of the relationship between infant mortality and socio-economic conditions for 8 EU countries from CEE which have an infant mortality rate (IMR) larger that the EU27 average. We use econometric modelling for panel data to identify the main determinants of infant mortality for these countries and to test if the decrease of IMR is determined not only by economic growth but also by social and health factors. The results support, on one hand, the assumption of a negative impact of the level of economic development, and on the other hand it indicates the presence of specific determinant factors for this group of European countries, such as abortion rate, unemployment or average age of female at first birth .

KEYWORDS: infant mortality, econometric modelling, economic development, CEE countries.

JEL classification: J10, I15, C51.