Decentralization and Health in the Philippines and Indonesia: an Interim Report

Recent decades have seen significant improvements in health indicators in many East Asian countries. The infant mortality rate (IMR), a useful overall health indicator, fell from 40 per 1000 live births in 1990 to 35 in 1999 for the East Asia region as a whole (Table 1). Yet progress on health in the region has tended to lag that on other development indicators, and to disappoint in several ways. For example, while reduction in East Asian income poverty in the 1990s was faster than in all other developing regions, that in the IMR, at about 1.5 percent a year, was less than half the 3-4 percent a year average pace in Latin America, Europe and Central Asia or the High Income countries. At this pace the region would fail to meet its Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of reducing infant mortality by two thirds between 1990 and 2015.