Context The United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set targets related to important global poverty, health, and sustainability issues. A critical but underinvestigated question for planning and allocating resources toward the MDGs is how interventions related to one MDG might affect...

This article aims to expose the limitations of existing methods by which international comparisons of telecommunications charges are made. Existing methods are distorted by many variables which vary from country to country. Consequently, results still need to be qualitatively debated on grounds...

Registration of births, recording deaths by age, sex and cause, and calculating mortality levels and differentials are fundamental to evidence-based health policy, monitoring and evaluation. Yet few of the countries with the greatest need for these data have functioning systems to produce them...

Objective To compare mortality burden estimates based on direct measurement of levels and causes in communities with indirect estimates based on combining health facility cause-specific mortality structures with community measurement of mortality levels. Methods. Data from sentinel vital...

Vital statistics generated through civil registration systems are the major source of continuous monitoring of births and deaths over time. The usefulness of vital statistics depends on their quality. In the second paper in this Series we propose a comprehensive and practical framework for...

Despite its widespread use, the Coale-Demeny model life table system does not capture the extensive variation in age-specific mortality patterns observed in contemporary populations, particularly those of the countries of Eastern Europe and populations affected by HIV/AIDS. Although relational...

Background Reliable information on causes of death is a fundamental component of health development strategies, yet globally only about one-third of countries have access to such information. For countries currently without adequate mortality reporting systems there are useful models other than...

Reliable, comparable information about the main causes of disease and injury in populations, and how these are changing, is a critical input for debates about priorities in the health sector. Traditional sources of information about the descriptive epidemiology of diseases, injuries, and risk...