Socio-economics factors and suicide rates in European Union countries

Are socio-economic factors valid determinants of suicide? The modern sociological theory of suicide is based on Durkheim's studies. In addition to these fundamental social determinants, modern theorists have put more attention on economic factors. The purpose of this research is to determine the relationship between suicide rates and socio-economic factors, such as demography, economic development, education, healtcares systems, living coundition and labour market. All data were collected from a Eurostat publication and they concern 25 European Union countries. in order to test his relationship, a discriminant analysis was performed using an ordinal dependent variable and a set of independent variables concerning socio-econpmic factors. A dataset of 37 independent variables was used. We estimated a model with five variables: annual growth rates for industry, people working in S&T (% of total employement), at-risk-of-poverty rate, all accidents (standardized rates), and healthcare expenditures (% of GDP). Highly significant values of Wilk's Lambda assess a good discriminating power of the model. The accuracy too is very high: all cases are correctly classified by the model. Countries with bhigh suicide rate levels are marked by high levels of at-risk-of-poverty rates, high annual growth rates for industry and low healthcare expenditures.