Trust - A Factor Of Production

The economic activity is more and more influenced by the condition and the evolution of some immaterial and non-financial elements which exist in a firm or a country. One of these elements - information - has unanimously been accepted as the 4th production factor. In this paper I try to demonstrate that trust too, has to be accepted as a production factor. Especially as it fulfils the fundamental conditions for this to happen : it is infinitly divisible and homogeneous and, thus, its marginal product can be calculated. In nowadays world, characterized by the apparently unstoppable expansion of the cruel individualism and of market fundamentalism, which have undermined the trust in the success of private initiative, producers increasingly need community, need another mode of involvement of the state in economy and they need another way of relating to each other. The costs resulting from the diminishing of trust have become so significant that their transformation into income is necessary, if we succeed in basing ourselves on trust in the economic process.