How useful are registered birth statistics for health and social policy? A global systematic assessment of the availability and quality of birth registration data

Abstract

BACKGROUND: The registration and certification of births has a wide array of individual and societal benefits. While near-universal in some parts of the world, birth registration is less common in many low- and middle-income countries, and the quality of vital statistics vary. We assembled publicly available birth registration records for as many countries as possible into a novel global birth registration database, and we present a systematic assessment of available data. METHODS: We obtained 4918 country-years of data from 145 countries covering the period 1948-2015. We compared these to existing estimates of total births to assess completeness of public data and adapted existing methods t..