Civil registration systems and vital statistics: successes and missed opportunities.

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 assessment of the quality of vital statistics.

The way forward.

Good public-health decisionmaking is dependent on reliable and timely statistics on births and deaths (including the medical causes of death). All high-income countries, without exception, have national civil registration systems that record these events and generate regular, frequent, and timely vital statistics. By contrast, these statistics are not available in many low-income and lower-middle-income countries, even though it is in such settings that premature mortality is most severe and the need for robust evidence to back decisionmaking most critical.