Does economic freedom push people into suicide? New evidence from developing and developed societies, 1980–2019

IF 0.9 4区经济学 Q3 ECONOMICS

American Journal of Economics and Sociology Pub Date : 2024-09-05 DOI:10.1111/ajes.12602

Minea Rutar, Tibor Rutar

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Abstract

This research paper investigates the impact of market liberalization on country-level suicide rates using a sample of 96 developing and developed countries from 1980 to 2019. We estimate fixed-effects panel regression models with robust standard errors clustered at the country level and conduct a variety of robustness checks, including using different estimators and disaggregating the data. We consistently find that the aggregate Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) measure is not statistically significantly related to within-country variations in age-standardized suicide rates, but some individual components are. Freedom to trade internationally weakly predicts increases in suicide rates, while sound money is associated with decreased suicide rates. The former result is highly vulnerable to different specifications. This study underscores the existence of a complex, non-intuitive relationship between market liberalization and suicide rates, suggesting that both critics and defenders of liberalization might be mistaken in making any unequivocal judgments about the process.

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来源期刊

American Journal of Economics and Sociology Multiple-

CiteScore

1.90

自引率

12.50%

发文量

期刊介绍： The American Journal of Economics and Sociology (AJES) was founded in 1941, with support from the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, to encourage the development of transdisciplinary solutions to social problems. In the introduction to the first issue, John Dewey observed that “the hostile state of the world and the intellectual division that has been built up in so-called ‘social science,’ are … reflections and expressions of the same fundamental causes.” Dewey commended this journal for its intention to promote “synthesis in the social field.” Dewey wrote those words almost six decades after the social science associations split off from the American Historical Association in pursuit of value-free knowledge derived from specialized disciplines. Since he wrote them, academic or disciplinary specialization has become even more pronounced. Multi-disciplinary work is superficially extolled in major universities, but practices and incentives still favor highly specialized work. The result is that academia has become a bastion of analytic excellence, breaking phenomena into components for intensive investigation, but it contributes little synthetic or holistic understanding that can aid society in finding solutions to contemporary problems. Analytic work remains important, but in response to the current lop-sided emphasis on specialization, the board of AJES has decided to return to its roots by emphasizing a more integrated and practical approach to knowledge.