New insights on suicide: uncertainty and political conditions

ABSTRACT

We study suicide rates across 17 countries, focusing on the relationships between suicide, and economic policy uncertainty, voice and accountability, and political stability. Results show high economic policy uncertainty is associated with increased suicides, suicide rates tend to increase in countries with lower voice and accountability and high political instability.

KEYWORDS:

• Suicide
• economic policy uncertainty
• voice and accountability
• political stability

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• C23
• I12
• I18
• E60

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Chen et al. (2012) provide a survey.

² Australia; Asia: Japan, Korea, Singapore; Europe: France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, UK; America: Canada, Mexico, USA; Eurasia: Russia.

³ Data available at: http://www.policyuncertainty.com/index.html.

⁴ Our results, available upon request, remain consistent after implementing a two-stage least squares model. We also implement a log-linear model as a robustness check, yielding similar results.