Did the UN convention on the rights of the child reduce child mortality around the world? An interrupted time series analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Child mortality has been reduced by more than 50 % over the past 30 years. A range of secular economic and social developments have been considered to explain this phenomenon. In this paper, we examine the association between ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which was specifically put in place to ensure the well-being of children, and declines in child mortality. METHODS: Data come from three sources: the United Nations Treaty Series Database, the World Bank World Development Indicators database and, the Polity IV database. Because CRC was widely ratified, leaving few control cases, we used interrupted times series analyses, which uses the trend in the health outcome before policy exposure to mathematically determine what the trend in the health outcome would have been after the policy exposure, if it had continued 'as is' - meaning, if the policy exposure had not occurred. RESULTS: CRC ratification was associated with declining child mortality. CRC ratification was associated with a significant change in shorter-term child mortality trends in all groups except high-income, non-democratic countries and low-imcome democratic countries. CRC ratification was associated with long-term child mortality trends in all groups except middle-income, non-democratic countries. CONCLUSIONS: Child mortality rates would likely have declined even in the absence of CRC ratification, but CRC is associated with a larger decline. Our findings provide a way to assess the effects of widely-held societal norms on health and demonstrate the moderating effects of democracy and income level.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.017 | 0.049 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".