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The Effect of Government Suicide Prevention Programs

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Economic Analysis of Suicide Prevention

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Abstract

Suicide poses a serious challenge on all modern societies and governments are expected to play a major role in its prevention. The previous two chapters showed that policy choices of the government have a crucial influence on the risk of suicide among the population. Yet our measures of policy choices, such as government partisanship in Chap. 7 and economic and welfare policies in Chap. 8, are not a direct and immediate suicide prevention effort. They were hypothesized to affect the lives of vulnerable population in society and thus their suicidal risks.

The content of this chapter was based on the published articles: “The Effect of Government Suicide Prevention Programs on Suicide Rates.” Social Science & Medicine 73: 1395–1400, 2011; “The Effect of Public Awareness Campaigns on Suicides: Evidence from Nagoya, Japan.” Journal of Affective Disorders 152–154: 526–529, 2014.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The data are available at http://www.mhlw.go.jp/stf/seisakunitsuite/bunya/0000134741.html.

  2. 2.

    The value of 1, not 0, was assigned for the purpose of log transformation.

  3. 3.

    We used the per capita amount in log.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Finn Gjertsen for informing us of an error in our analysis in the analysis reported in the second section of this chapter.

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Correspondence to Michiko Ueda .

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Sawada, Y., Ueda, M., Matsubayashi, T. (2017). The Effect of Government Suicide Prevention Programs. In: Economic Analysis of Suicide Prevention. Economy and Social Inclusion. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1500-7_9

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