The Impact of Fiscal Austerity on Suicide: On the Empirics of a Modern Greek Tragedy

Antonakakis, Nikolaos ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0904-3678 and Collins, Alan (2014) The Impact of Fiscal Austerity on Suicide: On the Empirics of a Modern Greek Tragedy. Social Science & Medicine. pp. 39-50. ISSN 0277-9536

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Abstract

Suicide rates in Greece (and other European countries) have been on a remarkable upward trend following the global recession of 2008 and the European sovereign debt crisis of 2009. However, recent investigations of the impact on Greek suicide rates from the 2008 financial crisis have restricted themselves to simple descriptive or correlation analyses. Controlling for various socio-economic effects, this study presents a statistically robust model to explain the influence on realised suicidality of the application of fiscal austerity measures and variations in macroeconomic performance over the period 1968-2011. The responsiveness of suicide to levels of fiscal austerity is established as a means of providing policy guidance on the extent of suicide behaviour associated with different fiscal austerity measures. The results suggest (i) significant age and gender specificity in these effects on suicide rates and that (ii) remittances have suicide-reducing effects on the youth and female population. These empirical regularities potentially offer some guidance on the demographic targeting of suicide prevention measures and the case for 'economic' migration. (authors' abstract)

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	To see the final version of this paper please visit the publisher's website. Access to the published version may require a subscription. The original publication is available at www.elsevier.com.
Keywords:	Greece / Fiscal austerity / Suicide / Unemployment / Debt crisis / Migration
Divisions:	Departments > Volkswirtschaft > Internationale Wirtschaft
Version of the Document:	Submitted
Variance from Published Version:	Typographical
Depositing User:	Nikolaos Antonakakis
Date Deposited:	10 Apr 2014 08:22
Last Modified:	07 Nov 2019 09:04
Related URLs:	Publisher
FIDES Link:	https://bach.wu.ac.at/d/research/results/66310/
URI:	https://epub.wu.ac.at/id/eprint/4116

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