Investigating suicidal trend and its economic determinants: evidence from India

This paper examines the trend and economic determinants of the suicidal deaths in India. Time-series data over the period 1967-2006 is used from various sources. The paper analyzes the suicidal trend and exploratory relationships between suicide rate and some of the demographic and other economic variates. Further, we use ARDL model to find out the association between suicide and some economic variables. We find that inflation, per capita real GDP and industrial growth encourages the incidences of suicides whereas increased per capita household income helps in reducing suicidal deaths in India.