Infant mortality

Deaths of children under one year of age, per 1,000 live births in the same year. A rate rather than a count, because births more than halved over this span: a falling number of infant deaths would read as progress even in a year the risk to a newborn had risen.

Milestones

Method and caveats

Eurostat’s demo_minfind series, indicator “infant mortality rate” — one of five rates that dataset carries, the others covering shorter windows around birth. Annual and gap-free from 1960. Statistics Lithuania publishes its own infant mortality rate from 1994 and the two do not match to the decimal: they differ by 0.1 to 0.3 in about half of the shared years, and 2020 reads 2.8 here against 3.0 there. Neither body states why, so the page states the difference and nothing more. The modern rate rests on a few dozen deaths a year, so single years move on small numbers and the shape of the fall is the readable part.