Global Birth Registration Database 1948-2015

As part of an analysis of the availability and quality of birth registration data worldwide, researchers from IHME and the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health compiled publicly available birth registration records into a novel birth registration database. They acquired 4,918 country-years of data from 145 countries covering the period 1948-2015. Data were collected from the United Nations Statistical Division (UNSD) database, Eurostat, and directly from national statistical offices and ministry of health databases. For each country-year, this database contains the number of registered live births by age of the mother, sex of the newborn, birth order, and birthweight. Results of the analysis were published in December 2018 in Population Health Metrics in "How useful are registered birth statistics for health and social policy? A global systematic assessment of the availability and quality of birth registration data."