A Changing Nexus Between Unemployment and Suicide in Taiwan: Before and After Labor Welfare Improvement in the Late 1990s

  • Yun-Shan Chan
  • Tsai-Ching Liu
  • Chin-Shyan Chen
  • Yu-I Peng
Article
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Abstract

Suicide has long been believed to be highly associated with unemployment. The connection between unemployment and suicide, however, might become weak with the development of social welfare system. Using the monthly data during 1991/1–2012/12 in Taiwan, the study examines the association between unemployment and suicide. Our empirical results reveal that unemployment rates clearly had a positive effect on suicide rates during 1990s when the social welfare system was not fully formatted. The positive suicide-unemployment nexus, however, was no longer significant since the authorities passed a series of welfare policies to take care of minorities with financial difficulties. The results show that labor welfare improvement may reduce the financial hardship from being jobless and, therefore, untied the connection between unemployment rates and suicide rates.

Keywords

Suicide Unemployment Labor welfare Job loss Financial hardship 
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Notes

Compliance with Ethical Standards

Conflict of interest

All the authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2017

Authors and Affiliations

  • Yun-Shan Chan
    • 1
  • Tsai-Ching Liu
    • 1
  • Chin-Shyan Chen
    • 2
  • Yu-I Peng
    • 1
  1. 1.Department of Public FinanceNational Taipei UniversityNew Taipei CityTaiwan
  2. 2.Department of EconomicsNational Taipei UniversityNew Taipei CityTaiwan

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