A global assessment of malnutrition in children under five has just been completed in UNICEF based on data available as of January 1990.The analysis is based on nationally representative data from 76 developing countries accounting for 83% of the under-five population of the developing world, excluding China.The data which come from a varicty of sorce refer mainly to national malnutrition prevalence in the 1980s, with half the countries having data for 1985 or later although for a few countries data from the late seventies are used in the absence of more recent estimates