The role of development in health, education, and ICT on decline of infant mortality of Sri Lanka

Abstract

The development of health, education and information communication technology have crucial role in infant mortality of a country. Even though the Sri Lanka is a developing country, it has recorded higher development in health, education and ICT. Here the question is whether higher development of health, education and ICT have contributed or not to increase life expectancy? That is what this study tries to find the role of development of health, education and ICT in infant mortality of Sri Lanka. For this study, annual data of Sri Lanka from 1980 to 2017 were used and the data was obtained from world development indicator database scatter graph, Correlation, and simple regression were used to analyse the relationship and ordinary least squares technique was used to estimate the regression models. Finding of this study emphasize that development of health has significantly reduced infant mortality of Sri Lanka. While, development of education and ICT also have contributed to fall infant mortality of Sri Lanka but it is insignificant. This study further founds that the lack of knowledge related to health and medicine causes for insignificant impact of educational development to reduce infant mortality. Besides, this study further finds that the technological knowledge of Sri Lanka is very less even though overall literacy of Sri Lanka reached high. This is the reason for insignificant influence of ICT to fall infant mortality. Then this study recommends that the government should provide priority to the projects which are related to increase the health and medical knowledge of the people and It is important to take measures to increase the technological knowledge and to connect the health and medical sector with information communication technology. Further new projects should be introduced to break out the limitation in using ICT by the people who live in rural area and with lack of literacy.