Investigating the Effects of Economic Uncertainty on Suicide Rate in Iran; in the Framework a Socio-economic Approach

Suicide is one of the major problems of modern world which attracted attention of scholars, scientists and politicians towards it. This problem led to destruction of human capital that based on the available evidence as a development factor. The considering of important and essential role of human resources, the causes of suicide is also important from economic perspective. Therefore, this study, in addition of economic factors influencing on suicide. In this composite index, five sources of volatility and uncertainty in Iranian economy is provided including GDP, inflation, exchange rate, Bank's profits rate and stock price index. The technique which is used has been Auto Regressive Distributed Lags (ARDL) method during period 1974-2014. The results indicate that with increasing economic uncertainty, suicide rate has increased in the country. On the other hand, the relationship of other economic variables including the Gini coefficient, the unemployment rate for women and men has a positive relationship with suicide rate. Increasing inflation and economic growth also had a negative effect on suicide rate. In this study social variables such as; divorce rate, literacy rate and the number of judicial cases (as a negative indicator of social capital) also used which relationship between these variables with suicide rate, is positive.