Economic Welfare, Civil Liberty, and Suicide: An Empirical Investigation

Performing an international cross-section study for 30 countries, this paper investigates the dependence of suicides rates on real income per capita, real income growth and civil liberty. Suicide rates are transformed into logits, and weighted seemingly unrelated Zellner-Aitken estimates are obtained for both sexes and seven age groups, where the weights correspond to the size of the population in each of the subgroups of the different countries. All three variables have significant effects on the suicide rate. The economic variables have a positive influence: the higher real per capita income and/or real economic growth, the higher the suicide rate is. But these results vary between age groups: income plays a more important role for the middle age group, whereas economic growth is more important for the older people. Moreover, older women react stronger to income growth than older men. With respect to civil liberty, we get ‘expected' results: the more liberty, the lower the suicide rates.