Routine Immunisation and Under-Five Mortality in Least Developed Countries - Dataset

This repository contains the analytical data, variable codebook and replication code used to examine the relationship between routine childhood immunisation and under-five mortality across 41 United Nations-classified least developed countries from 2000 to 2023. Eritrea, South Sudan and Yemen were excluded because of insufficient data coverage across the variables required for the empirical analysis.The country-year dataset includes under-five mortality, government health expenditure, out-of-pocket health expenditure, gross domestic product per capita and basic sanitation coverage. It also contains six vaccine-coverage indicators: the third dose of the diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis vaccine, measles-containing vaccine, third dose of the hepatitis B vaccine, Bacillus Calmette-Guérin vaccine, third dose of the Haemophilus influenzae type b vaccine and third dose of the polio vaccine. The health, economic and sanitation indicators were obtained from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators, while vaccine-coverage data were obtained from the Health Nutrition and Population Statistics database.The repository contains three files. LDCs_immunisation_data.csv provides the cleaned country-year panel used in the analysis. LDCs_immunisation_codebook.xlsx defines each variable, acronym, unit of measurement, transformation and data source. LDCs_immunisation_replication_code.txt contains the Stata commands used to reproduce the descriptive statistics, correlation matrix, diagnostic tests, fixed-effects models with Driscoll-Kraay standard errors, moderation analysis, split-panel jackknife method-of-moments quantile regression and marginal-effects figure.