IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/rsocec/v78y2020i4p532-560.html

Does unemployment aggravate suicide rates in South Africa? Some empirical evidence

Author

Listed:
  • Andrew Phiri
  • Doreen Mukuku

Abstract

The purpose of our study is to investigate the cointegration relationship between suicides and unemployment in South Africa using annual data collected between 1996 and 2015. The study relies on the bounds approach to autoregressive distributive lag (ARDL) cointegration model to establish long-run and short-run cointegration between unemployment and suicide rates. Furthermore, suicide data is further disintegrated into ‘sex’ and ‘age’ demographics to provide a more disaggregated analysis. Our empirical results indicate that unemployment is insignificantly related with suicide rates with the exception for citizens above 75 years. On the other hand, other control variables such as per capita GDP, inflation and divorce appear to be more significantly related with suicides. To the best of our knowledge, this study becomes the first to investigate the time series cointegration relationship between suicides and unemployment for South Africa data.

Suggested Citation

  • Andrew Phiri & Doreen Mukuku, 2020. "Does unemployment aggravate suicide rates in South Africa? Some empirical evidence," Review of Social Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 78(4), pages 532-560, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:rsocec:v:78:y:2020:i:4:p:532-560
    DOI: 10.1080/00346764.2019.1630667
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00346764.2019.1630667
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/00346764.2019.1630667?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or

    for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Izunna Anyikwa & Nicolene Haaman & Andrew Phiri, 2018. "Persistence of suicides in G20 countries: SPSM approach to three generations of unit root tests," Working Papers 1825, Department of Economics, Nelson Mandela University.
    2. Giorgio Mattei & Barbara Pistoresi, 2019. "Unemployment and suicide in Italy: evidence of a long-run association mitigated by public unemployment spending," The European Journal of Health Economics, Springer;Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gesundheitsökonomie (DGGÖ), vol. 20(4), pages 569-577, June.
    3. Mitch Kunce, 2022. "The Tenuous Ecological Divorce and Unemployment Link with Suicide: A U.S. Panel Analysis 1968-2020," Journal of Statistical and Econometric Methods, SCIENPRESS Ltd, vol. 11(3), pages 1-2.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • C22 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Single Equation Models; Single Variables - - - Time-Series Models; Dynamic Quantile Regressions; Dynamic Treatment Effect Models; Diffusion Processes
    • C51 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - Model Construction and Estimation
    • E24 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution; Aggregate Human Capital; Aggregate Labor Productivity
    • E31 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Price Level; Inflation; Deflation
    • E71 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macro-Based Behavioral Economics - - - Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on the Macro Economy

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:rsocec:v:78:y:2020:i:4:p:532-560. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RRSE20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.