An index for quantifying female education and child health in emerging economies.

OBJECTIVE To construct an index to measure female education and child health in the least developed countries (LDCs) of Asia. METHODS AND RESULTS The design of our index includes the variables of female education and child health defined in the goals of the Millennium Declaration. For this purpose, we used Pena's P2 distance method for 2011, the last year for which data were available for the set of variables. CONCLUSION We have proposed a territorial measure and classification of female education and child health in the LDCs of Asia. We believe that the most striking differences between countries relate to basic female education variables such as girls' primary completion rate, and female literacy.