SUICIDES IN THE BRAZILIAN MUNICIPALITIES: A SPATIAL APPROACH FOR CENSORED DATA

• Autor(a) principal: Alvarenga, Samia Mercado
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Outros Autores: Jorge, Marco Antonio, Maia do Amaral, Pedro Vasconcelos
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Análise Econômica (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://seer.ufrgs.br/index.php/AnaliseEconomica/article/view/93655
• topic: suicide; spatial econometrics; tobit; Brazilian municipalities; I12; C21; C24; Suicídio; Econometria Espacial; Tobit; Municípios Brasileiros.; I12; C21; C24

Suicide is recognized internationally as a public health problem that ranksamong the ten most frequent causes of death among the general population, surpassingthe number of deaths from armed conflict. In Brazil, according to data from the Mortality Information System, for each registered suicide, it is estimated that there are over twenty attempts not reported. Under-registration, coupled with rarity and the inherentcharacteristics of its distribution, makes the phenomenon even more complex, especially in the Brazilian context, where the continental dimensions carry socioeconomicand cultural heterogeneities. In order to verify the influence of socioeconomic factorsin the presence of spatial interactions, a spatially distributed Tobit model is applied tomunicipal data of 2010. The empirical approach adopted represents an important advance in the literature, since, besides considering the spatial autocorrelation a level ofaggregation that hitherto was not common to those surveyed regarding suicide, alsooffers a treatment for censored variables. The main results corroborate previous studiesabout the significant influence of socioeconomic factors and confirm spatial multipliereffects, consistent with the Durkheimian postulates about the contagious effect. Therefore, it is desirable that public policies to contain and prevent suicide take into accountnot only socioeconomic and demographic aspects, but also the territorial distribution ofoccurrences and the spatial interaction between them.