How Does Social Trust Affect Economic Growth

By Christian Bjørnskov. 2012

343 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article connects two strands of the literature on social trust by directly estimating the effects of trust on growth through a set of potential transmission mechanisms. It does so by modeling the process using a 3SLS estimator on a sample of 85 countries for which a full data set is available. The results indicate that trust affects schooling and the rule of law directly, thereby raising economic growth rates. The article closes with a short discussion of the relevance of the findings.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e71a3d4e2f36bfa6147b2ee15778fe5835b46af2

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Citations in the corpus

Political Empowerment, Rule of Law, and Women's Entry into Entrepreneurship (2015, methodology): “Rule of law has been used as a measure of the quality of governance (Bjornskov 2012) and has been found to affect economic growth (Barro 1997; Bjornskov 2012; Dollar and Kraay 2003; Rodrik, Subramanian, and Trebbi 2004).”
Toward a theory of transformative entrepreneuring: Poverty reduction and conflict resolution in Rwanda's entrepreneurial coffee sector (2013, background): “This is because studies at the country level have shown that social trust spurs economic development (Bjørnskov, 2012).”
Rural–Urban Differences in Bonding and Bridging Social Capital (2016, background): “…and KEEFER (1997), these studies have found strong support for a positive relationship between the two (e.g., WHITELEY, 2000; ZAK and KNACK, 2001; BJØRNSKOV, 2006).1 Moreover, at the regional level, BEUGELSDIJK and VAN SCHAIK (2005a, 2005b) found a positive relationship between social capital…”
Is trust the missing root of institutions, education, and development? (2013, methodology): “17 5 Conclusions A series of relatively recent studies show that social trust is robustly associated with long-run economic growth (Zak and Knack, 2001; Beugelsdijk et al., 2004; Bjørnskov, 2012).”