Does unemployment aggravate suicide rates in South Africa? Some empirical evidence

Our study investigates the cointegration relationship between suicides and unemployment in South Africa using annual data collected between 1996 and 2015 applied to the ARDL model. Furthermore, our empirical analysis is gender and age specific in the sense that the suicide data is disintegrated into different ‘sex’ and ‘age’ demographics. Our empirical results indicate that unemployment is insignificantly related with suicide rates with the exception for citizens above 75 years. On the other hand, other control variables such as per capita GDP, inflation and divorce appear to be more significantly related with suicides. Collectively, these findings have important implications for policymakers.