Comparative Economic Studies最新文献

Background: Suicide is a major public health problem, and most people, who attempt suicide, have a psychiatric disorder. The preventable nature of suicide has further warranted the conduct of studies on suicide.

Methods: This cross-sectional and descriptive study aimed to investigate the effects of depression, anxiety, and stress levels on suicidal behavior in patients with schizophrenia. The study included 222 patients with schizophrenia. Data were collected by using the Descriptive Information Form, the Suicide Behaviors Questionnaire, and the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales-Short Form.

Results: It was found that 47.7% of the participants had suicidal ideation and 33.8% of them had attempted suicide by taking pills, self-cutting, jumping from a height, and hanging. While the participants had moderate levels of depression and anxiety, their stress levels were normal. The study has shown that the variables of stress, a good income level, and employment affect suicidal behavior, with a 1-unit increase in stress scores leading to an increase by 0.942, a 1-unit decrease in the good income level leading to an increase by 1.132, and a 1-unit increase in employment leading to an increase by 1.316 in suicidal behavior. Stress, income status, and employment accounted for 42.3% of the change in suicidal behavior.

Conclusion: This study has shown that suicidal ideation and suicide attempts are common in patients with schizophrenia compared to the normal population, and increased stress levels, poor income, and working in a job increased the risk of suicide among these patients. It can be suggested that efforts for improving stress management in patients during the post-pandemic period may be effective in reducing the risk of suicide.

Remarkable resistance of Ukraine has become in the world focus starting from the dawn of February 24th, 2022. While policymakers draft plans to address the consequences of the war, it is crucial to understand the pre-war labor market context, risks of joblessness, inequalities, and sources of resilience. In this paper, we study inequality in job market outcomes in 2020-2021 during another global disaster-the COVID-19 epidemic. While there is a growing literature on worsening gender gap for developed countries, not much is known about the situation in transition countries. We fill in this gap in the literature by using novel panel data from Ukraine, which enacted strict quarantine policies early on. Our pooled and random effects models consistently indicate no gender gap in the probability of not working, fearing to lose job or having savings for less than one month. This interesting result of non-deteriorating gender gap can potentially be explained by higher chances of urban Ukrainian women to switch to telecommuting compared to men. Although our findings are limited to urban households only, they provide important early evidence on the effects of gender on job market outcomes, expectations, and financial security.

The paper analyses Political Budget Cycles in the context of a young post-communist democracy, Serbia. The authors deploy well-established methodological (time series) approaches to examine the general government budget balance (fiscal deficit) in conjunction with elections. The findings suggest that there is clear evidence of higher fiscal deficit prior to elections-however, this is the case only for regular (scheduled) elections and not so for snap (early called) elections. The paper contributes to the PBC literature by revealing different incumbent behaviour in regular versus early elections, thus highlighting the importance of distinguishing between these types of elections in the domain of PBC research.

We explore the distribution of public-private partnerships (PPPs) among the European Union countries, with a special focus on fiscal rules and budgetary constraints while controlling for empirically identified drivers. While offering the opportunity to increase innovation and efficiency in the public sector infrastructure, PPPs allow governments to relax their budget and borrowing constraints. We find that the state of public finances influences the government's choice of PPPs and makes them more appealing for reasons other than efficiency. Stringent numerical rules on the budget balance also foster government's opportunism in the choice of PPPs. On the other hand, high levels of public debt increase the country risk, and discourage private investors from PPP contracts. The results highlight the importance of restoring PPP investment choices based on efficiency criteria and adapt fiscal rules to shield public investment while stabilizing private expectations by means of credible trajectories of debt reduction. The findings contribute to the debate on the role of fiscal rules in fiscal policy and of PPPs in infrastructure financing.

Climate change is a big challenge of our time. While there is a bourgeoning literature on the economic impact of climate change, research on how financial crises affect climate change is limited. We empirically use the local projection method to empirically study the impact of past financial crises on climate change vulnerability and resilience indices. Using a dataset covering 178 countries over the period 1995-2019, we observe that resilience to climate change shocks has been increasing and that advanced economies are the least vulnerable. Our econometric results suggest that financial crises (particularly systematic banking ones) tend to lead to a short-run deterioration in a country's resilience to climate change. This effect is more pronounced in developing economies. In downturns, if an economy is hit by a financial crisis, vulnerability to climate change increases.