Journal of Emerging Trends in Economics and Management Sciences: Home

Abstract:
The levels of infant and child mortality are the two sensitive and widely used indicators of socio-economic development. The child mortality rate is a refined and sensitive index of the total cultural milieu of a community or a country. It reflects among other things, the state of public health and hygiene, the environmental sanitation, cultural mores about feeding and clothing, socio-economic development, and above all, the people?s attitude towards the dignity and value of human life itself. It is the simple statistical index which conveys the idea of whether environmental hazards, including contagious diseases, ebola, cholera, etc. are controlled effectively or not in the less developed countries, especially in Africa. The under five mortality situation in South Africa has been investigated in this research using South African Demographic and Health Survey data. About ten socio-economic, demographic, environmental and health-related variables were analyzed using categorical data modeling (catmod) analysis. On the basis of the analyses, the study concludes that education of both parents, marital status of the mother as well as her occupation, the loss of older children previously and the duration of breastfeeding, are the factors affecting under five mortality in South Africa.

Keywords: sensitive index, environmental hazard, factors, socio-economic development, under five mortality, categorical modeling (catmod), South African Demographic and Health Survey (SADHS)

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