IS THERE A LONG RUN NEXUS AMONG MENTAL DISORDER AND SOCIO-ECONOMIC INDICATORS? : EXPERIENCES FROM AN ECONOMETRIC STUDY ACROSS 40 COUNTRIES

Ramesh CHANDRA DAS

Associate Professor, Department of Economics, Vidyasagar University, Midnapur 721102, West Bengal, India

ramesh051073@gmail.com

(Corresponding author)

Sovik MUKHERJEE

Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Faculty of Commerce and Management Studies, St. Xavier’s University, Kolkata, India

sovik1992@gmail.com

Abstract

Are there evidences of an association between poor mental health and the experience of poverty and socio-economic deprivation? To explore it, we try to relate all sorts of mental disorders with the per-capita GDP (PCGDP), the level of per-capita CO2 emissions as a measure of pollution (PCCO), usage of Internet (IU) as a measure of social behaviour, and Globalization Index (GI), for all the major countries in the world. Applying Vector Autoregression (VAR) model the results reveal that most of the high income countries in the selection have produced the result that mental disorder is cointegrated to the four socio economic indicators. The short run causality tests unambiguously backs up the sustainability of the long run cointegration relations derived for countries like Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and UAE. Hence, mental disorder is not a problem to the lower income countries but to the high income countries as well.

Keywords: Mental health, poverty gap, CO2 emissions, terrorism, internet, gender, globalization

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