Wealth as a determinant of suicide rates: An empirical approach

Alvaro Sanchez Sanbenito

Sebastián Rueda Robles
Jesús Sanz Ruiz
Sergio Ordoñez Beltrán

1- Introduction:

The literature about determinants of suicide levels is abundant, especially because it has
been treated in a large degree from psychological, psychiatric and public health perspective.
However, few studies have attempted to define the impact of economic variables - and in
particular the living standards of a country - on suicide rates. For this reason, we aim to
investigate the impact and level of statistical significance of wealth levels measured as
GDP per-capita, on suicides rates across countries.

According to Durkheim 2006, the suicide can have two main causes: i) psychological
factors and individual behaviors that only depend of personal and individual factors and ii)
socio-economic factors derived from the political, religious and economic context of which
a set of subfactors emerge as those associated with the behavior of the labor market, the job
and occupation, as well as the levels of poverty, inequality and wealth in a country
(Durkheim, 1930).

The relationship between wealth and levels of well-being of a country with suicide rates has
been investigated from an empirical point of view by (Marusic, Kan, & Farmer, 2002) who
found that the high levels of GDP per capita in European countries are associated with low
suicide rates but with a week statistical association. On the other hand, (Jungeilges &
Kirchgässner, 2002) estimate the impact of economic well-being - measured by per capita
income - of thirty countries in suicide rates per hundred thousand inhabitants. The results of
this investigation showed that in general, higher levels of per capita income are a
determining factor of the high suicides rates. For example, for people aged 25-74 years, the
estimated coefficient is statistically significant and takes values between 0.13 and 0.40.
To address the above, in the next part we will provide the materials and methods used in
this research work, specifically, we describe the data used and the description of the
statistical methods and empirical technics used during the research work. In the second
section we expose the results of the descriptive analysis, statistical test and also the liner
regression. Finally, we provide the conclusions.

2- Methods and Materials:

As previously stated, the main objective of our research is to find the impact of economic
wealth on the suicide rate. To reach this goal, we are going to build a simple model using
the data for the variable “suicide per 100.000 people” which is number of people for every
100 000 inhabitants that committed suicide for each country in our database for a given
year, and the variable GDP per capital, which shows the GDP per capita for a given year
for every country in our database. Our raw data runs from 1985 to 2010 for 99 countries1.

To accomplish our research, we imported both packages “dplyr” AND “janitor” to be able
to use the adequate functions and orders for our orders. Once we had the necessary tools for
our analysis, we tried to optimize our data set, and so we proceeded to some data cleaning.
We started by erasing the variables “Generation”, as the goal of our investigation, as
explained before, is to find out if economic wealth has a significant general impact in the
suicide rate, and so we would not like to run a specific generation-by-generation test.
Furthermore, as each generation has a different socio-economical and more importantly,
contrasted cultural mentality, we would bump into a series of variables which we cannot
account for, and which could interfere with our final results, as we only want to know the
impact of economic factors.

Moreover, we retired the data from 2010 onwards due to multiple missing values in the
later years. We made the same decision with the variable “HDI” after running a test for
missing values, as we had 18384 missing values in this particular column. We therefore
retired it as it was utterly incomplete.

1
This research work was built taking into account the results and procedures made by (Morgan, 2016).
Afterwards, we tested our two variables “suicides per every 100.000” and “GDP per capita”
for any present outliers and to check for the distribution of our data, to verify if could
construct a normal distribution. We also analyzed graphically the distribution of the
average global rate of suicides along the period 1985-2010, which is the result of the sum
of suicide rate of all the countries in the database divided by the number of countries. To
see if there was an identical trend in all the countries, or if every country followed a
different evolution throughout the period, we also ran a graph to check for the evolution of
a sample of countries (a developed country, Spain, and two countries in development but
with different socio-cultural landscapes).

Having cleaned and manipulated our data, we proceeded to use our new variables “Suicide
Rate” which represents the number of suicides for every 100.000 inhabitants in a country
from our data in a particular year, and the variable “GDP per capita” which represents the
wealth of a given country in our database at a given year from our data. We then did a first
sight test for simple correlation between our independent and our dependent variable.
Finally, we run our regression by OLS estimation, following this model:

Suicide Rate =α + β∗GDP per capita+ ε

3- Results:

The main objective of this section is to provide the main results of our statistical analysis of
the relationship between GDP per capita and suicides rates.

Table 1: Descriptive statistics – Suicide rates

A first look to the statistics of “Suicide Rate” – Table 1- can show us that the mean rate of
suicide for a given country at any year is close to 13 suicides per 100 000 inhabitants.
Secondly, we can see that the range is 224.97. We can also observe that there is a
interquartile difference of 16.2, which means that the central 50% of the countries had a
suicide rate between 1 and 17 for every 100 000 inhabitants. We can see that the median is
far closer to the first quartile than to the third quartile, which shows a greater concentration
between the countries with lower suicide rates than between the higher ones.

Table 2: Descriptive statistics – GDP per capita

As for GDP per capita -Table 2- , the main observation is that the average mean is 14774
USD. we can observe that there is an immense difference between the poorest (251 USD)
and the richest country (121,315 USD), and between this and the mean, which can mean
dispersion. We can also observe that the median is closer to the 1 quartile than to the 3rd
quartile too, leading to the same conclusion as for “Suicide rate”.

Graph 1: Box plot Suicide rates and GDP per capita

Figure 1: Boxplot for “GDP per capita” Figure 2: Boxplot for “Suicide rate”
Taking insight into our data, we can see in the Graph 1 that our dependent variable keeps a
constant variation throughout the years, and so numbers stay at a constant interval through
the years, with small variance. Furthermore, we can see a graphical confirmation of the
previous statement we did, as there is less distance between the first quartile and the median
than between the median and the third quartile.

Moreover, it is significant the high number of outlier values present in every year. As for
the variable GDP per capita, as we can see in the graph in the right, there has been an
increase in the variance throughout the years, due to uneven evolution of countries´ GDP
throughout these years. Specially from 2003 onwards. In this variable, we can also state
that there is a further concentration of values between the first quartile and the median than
between the median and the third quartile. On the contrary, we can see that this variable has
far less outliers, so dispersion is not so high.

Results for the Chi-test:

After running the normal distribution test, we can see in the Graph 2 and conclude
graphically that our data in both variables does not follow a normal distribution. We can see
the evolution of the variables differ continuously and notably from the benchmark line.
Therefore, we can conclude that our variables do not behave as a Chi^2 distribution. This
takes us to analyze for the type of distribution our data follows.

Graph 2: Chi Test – Suicide rates and GDP per capita

 Figure 4: Normal Q-Q Plot for “GDP per capita” Figure 3: Normal Q-Q Plot for “Suicide rate”

Regarding the distribution of our data, we can see in the Graph 3 that there are rarely in any
year or country more than 50 suicides occur, most concentrating in a very low number, in
an interval from 0 to 30. A number of suicides bigger than 100 for any given country in any
year is inexistent.

As for the GDP per capita, we can see that most of the countries at any given year are low
income countries, having a great concentration between 0 and 10.000 USD, and then
greatly decreasing but still significant in the interval from 10 000 to 30 000 USD, and from
this value to 60 000 USD, the frequency density is much lower. We can see that hardly no
country in any given year had wealth per inhabitant greater than 60 000 USD. We can
therefore see that there is a great concentration in the lower limits of our data, and a low
dispersion of it, as we can see our intervals are quite narrow.

Graph 3: Histogram – Suicide rates and GDP per capita

Figure 5: Histogram for “Suicide Rate” Figure 6: Histogram for “GDP per capita”
Analyzing the global suicide rates, we can see in the Graph 4 that the tendency has a bell
shape, having an acute increase from 1988 up to 1995, and then staring to follow a
downward constant trend (except for some slight punctual increases in 1998, 2001 and
2008). We can also see that the distribution is symmetrical as for half of the years, the rate
of suicides has stayed below the average, whilst for half of the years (period 1993-2005) the
rate has increased over the average. There is no high correlation with booms and crisis, as
we can see that during that even during the first years of the current economic recession,
there was a decrease in the rate of suicides (except for a slight increase in the year of the
outbreak, 2008). Furthermore, there was an increase in the rate during the 1990s, a period
of relative stability (although this can be explained due to an enormous increase in suicides
in ex-Soviet Republics, due to the Perestroika which brought them down in these years).

In the case of our subdivision sample, we can see that the pattern is almost identical to that
of the global trend, so we can say that there is a global international behavior which is
similar in every country. The only exception is the period in the early 90s, but this is due to
the reason earlier explained, as Lithuania (included in this sample) was a soviet Republic
too.

Graph 4: Global trend

Regression Results:
Our regression results showed in Table 1 confirms that there is association at all between
the number of suicides in a country and the economic wealth of this country. In particular,
it shows that GDP per capita has no significant association with suicides rates across
countries p-value = 0.107 and the R^2 is near to zero. Therefore, economic wealth is
unrelated with the level of suicides. This result is subject to a given limitation, first because
in our regression we did not correct the dataset by outliers and also because we did not
control by other factors in the regression analysis2. Additionally, this result in consistent
with the results of (Marusic, Kan, & Farmer, 2002) where GDP per capita had a week
association with suicide rates.

Table 3: Regression results:

4- Conclusion:

The main objective of this research work was to estimate the impact and statistical
association of the level of wealth on suicide rates across countries. The results of our
regression analysis showed that GDP per capita has not impact on the levels of suicide rates
per 100.000 habitants although some stylized facts such as the global trend of those

2
It is important to clarify that the original data set that we use had to be formatted by the tools seen during
the lectures and we did not use any specialized statistical packages at all. So, at the end it is likely that the
final results may have been affected by the data manipulation.
variables behaves similar across time. The investigation used a sample of 99 countries
around the world and data between 1985-2010.

Future research works could analyse the impact of wealth on suicide rates but controlling
for other factors, such as ideological tendency (political ideology) of each country, the
levels of inequality measured by GINI, and also desegregate the analysis by gender and age
ranges.

Sources

Marusic, A., Kan, M., & Farmer, A. (2002). Can poverty and the level of literacy explain the
different suicide rates in Europe? Eur. J. Psychiat., 16(2), 111-116.
Jungeilges, J., & Kirchgässner, G. (2002). Economic welfare, civil liberty, and suicide: an
empirical investigation. Journal of Socio-Economics, 215–231.
Morgan, L. (2016). World Health Organisation: Global Suicide Trends & Analysis. Kaggle.
Durkheim, É. (1930). Le Suicide : Étude de sociologie. Paris: Presses universitaires de
France.