Testing the effect of specific socioeconomic factors on the ischemic mortality rate. The case of Greece

Abstract

In this paper we present a model to evaluate the effect of certain majors socioeconomic factors (such as alcohol and fat consumption, cigarettes smoking, unemployment rate as a proxy for uncertainty which results frustration, number of passenger cars as a proxy for physical exercise and per capita GDP as a proxy for nutrition quality), to the ischemic mortality rate. Since the existing research works on this field, suffer from the proper model testing, we analytically present all the tests necessary to justify the reliability of the result obtained. For this purpose, after specifying and estimating the model, we applied the specification error test, the linearity, multicollinearity and heteroscedasticity tests, the autocorrelation and stability tests and the ARCH effect test.

Finally, we present the aggregate efect of the above socioeconomic factors. In brief, we found that an increase of cigarettes smoked, of fat and alcohol consumption and the number of passenger cars will result to a relevant increase regarding mortality. The latter one is also affected by the changes in unemployment rate. On the other hand, an increase of personal disposable income may negatively affect mortality, by almost the same portion.