Growing Apart, Losing Trust? The Impact of Inequality on Social Capital
Growing Apart, Losing Trust? The Impact of Inequality on Social Capital
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渐行渐远，失去信任？
DOI：
10.5089/9781475529487.001.a001
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发表时间：
2016
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
A. Hijzen
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Eric D. Gould;A. Hijzen
人们普遍认为，在美国和其他发达经济体，信任和社会资本都在下降，而收入不平等则有加剧的趋势。虽然之前的研究已经指出，随着个体之间的相似度降低，衡量的信任会下降，但本文探讨了社会资本的下降趋势是否与收入差距的扩大有关。该分析使用了美国全国选举调查（ANES）和欧洲社会调查（ESS）的数据。我们对美国的分析利用了各州和时间的差异（1980-2010），而我们对ESS的分析利用了欧洲国家和时间的差异（2002-2012）。研究结果提供了强有力的证据，表明无论是在美国还是在其他发达经济体，总体上的不平等都会降低个人对他人的信任感。这些影响主要源于剩余不平等，这可能与公平的概念以及分布底部的不平等更密切相关。由于信任在现有文献中一直与经济增长和发展联系在一起，这些发现表明，不平等影响宏观经济表现的一种重要的间接方式。
There is a widespread perception that trust and social capital have declined in United States as well as other advanced economies, while income inequality has tended to increase. While previous research has noted that measured trust declines as individuals become less similar to one another, this paper examines whether the downward trend in social capital is responding to the increasing gaps in income. The analysis uses data from the American National Election Survey (ANES) for the United States, and the European Social Survey (ESS) for Europe. Our analysis for the United States exploits variation across states and over time (1980-2010), while our analysis of the ESS utilizes variation across European countries and over time (2002-2012). The results provide robust evidence that overall inequality lowers an individual’s sense of trust in others in the United States as well as in other advanced economies. These effects mainly stem from residual inequality, which may be more closely associated with the notion of fairness, as well as inequality in the bottom of the distribution. Since trust has been linked to economic growth and development in the existing literature, these findings suggest an important, indirect way through which inequality affects macro-economic performance.