Seminario

Social capital and the quality of economic development

Riassunto

This paper carries out an empirical assessment of the relationship connecting social capital’s diverse dimensions to the “quality” of economic development in Italy. The analysis draws on a dataset collected by the author including about two hundred variables. The quality of development is measured through human development and indexes of the state of health of urban ecosystems, public services, gender equality, and labour markets, while social capital is measured through synthetic indicators, built by means of a series of principal component analyses, representing the four structural dimensions of strong family ties (referred to as bonding social capital), weak informal ties (bridging social capital), voluntary organizations (linking social capital), and political participation.
The structure of correlations is analyzed through a multidimensional analysis and shows that the quality of development is significantly and positively correlated to bridging weak ties (shaped by bridging and linking social capital) and negatively correlated to strong family ties. The causal nexus connecting social capital’s and development’s different dimensions is then analyzed through structural equations models providing a solid proof of the positive role of linking social capital and of
the negative influence exerted by strong family ties.