Does Social Capital Have an Economic Payoff A Cross-Country Investigation-英文文献.pdf

DOES SOCIAL CAPITAL HAVE AN ECONOMIC PAYOFF? A CROSS-COUNTRY INVESTIGATION* STEPHEN KNACK AND PHILIP KEEFER This paper presents evidence that “social capital” matters for measurable eco- nomic performance, using indicators of trust and civic norms from the World Val- ues Surveys for a sample of 29 market economies. Memberships in formal groups—Putnam’s measure of social capital—is not associated with trust or with improved economic performance. We find trust and civic norms are stronger in nations with higher and more equal incomes, with institutions that restrain predatory actions of chief executives, and with better-educated and ethnically ho- mogeneous populations. I. INTRODUCTION The notion of social capital has attracted great academic and journalistic attention, particularly with the publication of Put- nam’s Making Democracy Work [1993], in which the concept is used to explain differences in the economic and government per- formance of northern and southern Italy. We explore in this paper the following issues related to social capital and economic performance: i) the relationship between interpersonal trust, norms of civic cooperation, and economic performance, and some of the policy and other links through which these dimen- sions of social capital may have economic effects; ii) the conflicting hypotheses of Putnam [1993] and Olson [1982], on the relationship between associational activity and growth; and iii) the determinants of trust and norms of civic cooperation, including levels of associational activity and formal institutions. Trust, cooperative norms, and associations within groups each fall within the elastic definitions that most scholars