Infant mortality in Kyrgyzstan before and after the break-up of the Soviet Union

Abstract

There is a great deal of uncertainty over the levels of, and trends in, infant mortality in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. As a result, the impact of the break-up of the Soviet Union on infant mortality in the region is not known, and proper monitoring of mortality levels is impaired. In this paper, a variety of data sources and methods are used to assess levels of infant mortality and their trend over time in one Central Asian republic, Kyrgyzstan, between 1980 and 2010. An abrupt halt to an already established decline in infant mortality was observed to occur during the decade following the break-up of the Soviet Union, contradicting the official statistics based on vital registration. Infants of Central Asian ethnicity and those born in rural areas were also considerably more at risk of mortality than suggested by the official sources. We discuss the implications of these findings, both for health policy in this seldom studied part of the former Soviet Union and for our understanding of the health crisis which it currently faces.

Keywords:

• infant mortality
• Kyrgyzstan
• Central Asia
• former Soviet Union
• indirect estimation techniques
• data quality

Notes

1 Michel Guillot is at the Population Studies Center, University of Pennsylvania, 3718 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. E-mail: [email protected]. So-jung Lim is at Utah State University; Liudmila Torgasheva is at the National Statistical Committee of the Kyrgyz Republic; Mikhail Denisenko is at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow.

2 The authors would like to thank Zarylbek Kudabaev, former chairman of the National Statistical Committee of the Kyrgyz Republic, and Orozmat Abdykalykov, the current chairman, for providing them with access to much of the evidence used in this paper. They are also grateful to Larissa Mimbaeva and Elena Komandirova for supervising the data collection in Kyrgyzstan. Jane Falkingham provided useful comments on an earlier draft. This project was supported by grants from NICHD, R03 HD38752, and R01 HD045531.