Social Capital and Economic Performance: Analytics*

Abstract

This paper has been written for Elinor Ostrom and Toh-Kyeong Ahn, eds., Social Capital: A Reader (forthcoming, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK). It is a greatly revised and adapted version of my article, "Economic Progress and the Idea of Social Capital", in Social Capital: A Multifacted Perspective, edited by Partha Dasgupta and Ismail Serageldin (World Bank, Washington, DC: 2000). The earlier essay essay came about at Ismail Serageldin's behest. He felt it would be a worthwhile exercise if I were to connect the ideas developed in Dasgupta (1993) with those in Putnam (1993), to see if the concept of social capital has potency for an understanding of the kinds of institution that are most likely to protect and promote human well-being in poor countries. The earlier essay and the current, revised version are about that. If the understanding I reached in my earlier works and also reach here is somewhat different from Putnam's, it may well be because I have been studying certain aspects of rural life in sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian sub-continent, while Putnam has been investigating the functioning of civil society in contemporary Italy (more recently, the United States; Putnam, 2000). The point isn't so much that the context matters, rather, it is that widening the set of contexts exposes the complexity of the idea of social capital and its efficacy.