Paper Title
Suicide Ratesin OECD Countries: Reevaluating Relationship With Socio-Economic Factors, And Social Media
Abstract
This paper examines the relationship between suicide in OECD countries and socio-economic variables. The
inflation rate as an economic stressor has the predicted relationship with suicide rates. Surprisingly, unemployment rate and
GDP per capita did not have a significant effect on suicide rate, which is in line with existing works indicating that economic
factors do not have a consistent impact on suicide rates. GDP per capita may have yielded no significant effects due to a
“Humped-U” trend; meaning economic pressure may be highest for medium-level income countries while lower for poor or
rich countries. Thus, there may be no consistent relationship between income level and suicide rates. Nevertheless, GDP per
capita growth rate was significant throughout the model for both total and gender-specific suicide rate. An increase in GDP
growth rate leads to a higher suicide rate in fast-growing countries, including particularly when GDP per capita is relatively
low to moderate. On the other hand, for a group of countries with a high GDP per capita, a high growth rate does not seem to
add economic pressure or to increase suicide rate. In contrast to rather mixed performances of economic variables, the
variables related to social aspects have superior explanatory powers Theurbanization index yielded a relatively large positive
coefficient, suggesting thata weakening of social support network significantly increases suicide rate. Another interesting
result is the negative coefficient of mobile cellular subscriptions, which suggests technology has provided positive outlets for
people to interact as a community and thus provoked positive impacts on suicidal behavior. These two variables suggest the
importance of social supports, which may warrant further careful attention for suicide prevention.
Keywords— Suicide; Socio-Economic Factors; Urbanization; Social Media; Suicide Prevention.