An Assessment of the Debt Burden Effect on the Suicide Rate in Russian Regions

Population size is one of the most important parameters of national social and economic systems. It is controlled by multiple factors (components) that form ambiguous and complex feedback loops. The most important issue in this case is the study of the behavioral reactions of the population that form certain parameters of the population dynamics. In this article, the authors consider only one behavioral reaction that seems important to them, that is, suicidal tendencies, which ultimately leads to the formation of a suicide dynamics that entails serious socioeconomic and demographic losses. Emphasis is placed on assessing the impact of financial parameters, namely the size of the debt burden on households, on the suicide rate in general in the Russian regions. An econometric assessment of the impact of the volume of individual debt on the suicide rate among other socioeconomic factors (unemployment rate, logarithm of GRP per capita, divorce rate, number of persons with mental disorders, average actual duration of the work week, number of persons with alcoholism) was carried out for the regions as a whole, as well as among rural and urban populations. We used panel data for 80 federal subjects of Russia for 2005–2018. The system generalized method of moments was applied. The calculations were carried out using the Stata 14 stistical package. As a result of the study, a negative effect of the individual debt volume on the suicide rate in the regions of Russia was revealed, which contradicts the results of similar studies conducted for developed economies. At the same time, certain results obtained earlier in Russian and foreign studies were confirmed, including a U-shaped relationship between work hours and the suicide rate and a direct relationship between an increase in the suicide rate and an increase in divorce rates, the number of persons with mental disorders, as well as unemployment and consumption of alcohol products. The latter manifestation is characteristic, first of all, of the population of rural areas both in Russia and abroad.