Australia is lagging behind other countries in the global effort to reduce the number of children who die before they turn five.
Poorer health outcomes for the nation's indigenous people account for part of Australia's performance in the assessment of how countries are tackling child mortality.
Published on Monday in the Lancet, it paints an overall positive picture of declining mortality rates globally.
University of Queensland Professor Alan Lopez was co-author of the report, which shows for every thousand children born in Australia, 4.7 under the age of five would die this year.
This was a significant improvement on the figure 20 years ago (9.9 in 1990) and 40 years ago (23.1 in 1970) but Prof Lopez said other countries had made bigger improvements.
"We haven't been quite as successful in terms of child mortality," Prof Lopez told AAP.
"The absolute risk of child death in Australia is very low, less than five per 1,000 births, but in some countries like Singapore it is actually less than three."
"So there is still a little bit of a gap there, and there are a lot of countries in western Europe that are between Singapore and Australia."
Singapore now has the lowest rate of child mortality in the world, at 2.5 deaths per thousand births and this was down from 29.2 in 1970.
Poorer health outcomes in Australia's indigenous communities could explain some of the nation's lower rate of decline, Prof Lopez said.
"We certainly have a two-speed health status," he said.
"... where indigenous Australians have three times higher risk of child death than non indigenous Australians and that is a very unfortunate situation."
"That accounts for part, but not all, of the gap."
The research took in more than 1,600 different measures of mortality in young children, from official death registries in developed countries to household surveys in developing nations.
Looking globally, the report forecast 7.7 million children aged under five to die in 2010 and this figure was down from 11.9 million deaths in 1990, and 16 million deaths in 1970.
Less than one per cent of these deaths occur in high income countries such as Australia, with almost half (49.6 per cent) in sub-Saharan Africa and 33 per cent in south Asia.
The research also pointed to positive "evidence of accelerating declines" in child mortality over the past decade compared to the 1990s, with substantial improvements seen in countries including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Kenya, China, Burma, Somalia and Pakistan.
"This is a good message for global public health that we are being successful in reducing child mortality, but that residual burden of 7.7 million deaths a year is largely preventable and we need to keep at it," Prof Lopez said.
The worst performing countries was Equatorial Guinea with 180.1 child deaths in 2010 per 1,000 births.
