Infant Mortality Rate by Country, Historical Data 1990-2024

About This Dataset

Deaths of infants under one year old per 1,000 live births in twelve countries at benchmark years from 1990 to 2024, from World Bank Open Data, which publishes the UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation series.

✨ AI Insight

Every country in this chart has improved, which is why the differences in speed matter more than the direction. China fell from 43.3 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 4.1 in 2024, a drop of about 91 percent, and now sits closer to Germany at 3.1 than to any middle-income country. Ethiopia made the largest absolute gain, from 127.2 to 34.5, and India fell from 84.4 to 23.3. Nigeria is the exception that defines the chart: it started at 104.7, a little below Ethiopia, and is at 69.8 in 2024, having barely moved since 2015 and having actually risen slightly from its 2015 low of 68.0. It is now the highest here, twice the Ethiopian rate of 34.5. At the other end the rich countries have converged so far that the remaining gaps are small in absolute terms but large in ratio: Japan at 1.8 has a rate three times lower than the United States at 5.5. Movement has nearly stopped at this end of the table, with Germany down just 0.4 and the United States 0.7 since 2010.

Source: World Bank Open Data (UN IGME)

Key Findings

Auto-computed highlights from this dataset

🏆

Nigeria leads with 70 in 2024.

📉

China declined most: -90.5% from 1990 to 2024 (43.30 → 4.10).

📊

Average value in 2024: 20 · median: 18.

📅

1990 recorded the highest combined total across all categories.

↔️

Gap in 2024: Nigeria is 38.8× larger than Japan.