Social Capital, Institutions and Trust

Forming social capital--does participatory planning foster trust in institutions?

Participatory planning that includes interest groups and municipal representatives has been presented as a means to deal with the increasing difficulty to reach arrangements due to progressively scarce land resources. Under dispute is whether collaborative forms of planning augment social capital or whether they might actually cause the destruction of such a valuable social commodity. In this p...

Race, trust and social capital

Trust, Institutions, and Institutional Change: Industrial Districts and the Social Capital Hypothesis

Much current work in the social sciences seeks to understand the effects of trust and social capital on economic and political outcomes. However, the sources of trust remain unclear. In this article, the authors articulate a basic theory of the relationship between institutions and trust. The authors apply this theory to industrial districts, geographically concentrated areas of small firm prod...

Cyberspace markets, social capital and trust

This short contribution outlines several economic approaches to the issue of trust in cyberspace interactions ranging from e-commerce to interpersonal communication. The purpose is to illustrate some practical contributions that specific areas of economic analysis can make to the analysis of behaviour and to the setting of policies and rules. The focus is on instrumental or ‘purposive’ transact...

Trust, Social Capital and Economic Development∗†

Many argue that elements of a society’s norms, culture or social capital are central to understanding its development. However, these notions have been difficult to capture in economic models. Here we explore a possible role for ‘trustworthiness’ as corresponding to social capital. Individuals are trustworthy when they perform in accordance with promises, even if this does not maximize their pa...