IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/ratioi/0144.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Historical Trust Levels Predict Current Welfare State Design

Author

Listed:
  • Bergh, Andreas

    (The Ratio Institute and Lund University)

  • Bjørnskov, Christian

    (Aarhus School of Business, Aarhus University)

Abstract

Using cross-sectional data for 76 countries, we apply instrumental variable techniques based on pronoun drop, temperature and monarchies to demonstrate that historical trust levels predict several indicators of current welfare state design, including universalism and high levels of regulatory freedom. We argue that high levels of trust and trustworthiness are necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for societies to develop successful universal welfare states that would otherwise be highly vulnerable to free riding and fraudulent behavior. Our results do not exclude positive feedback from welfare state universalism to individual trust, although we claim that the important causal link runs from historically trust levels to current welfare state design.

Suggested Citation

  • Bergh, Andreas & Bjørnskov, Christian, 2009. "Historical Trust Levels Predict Current Welfare State Design," Ratio Working Papers 144, The Ratio Institute.
    • Handle: RePEc:hhs:ratioi:0144
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.ratio.se/pdf/wp/ab_cb_historical.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Oasis Kodila-Tedika & Julius Agbor, 2016. "Does Trust Matter for Entrepreneurship: Evidence from a Cross-Section of Countries," Economies, MDPI, vol. 4(1), pages 1-17, March.
    2. Andreas Bergh & Magnus Henrekson, 2011. "Government Size And Growth: A Survey And Interpretation Of The Evidence," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 25(5), pages 872-897, December.
    3. Eiji Yamamura, 2012. "Government Size and Trust," Review of Social Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 70(1), pages 31-56, December.
    4. Yamamura, Eiji, 2010. "Public policy, trust and growth: disclosure of government information in Japan," MPRA Paper 27703, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    5. Kelkar, Vijay & Shah, Ajay, 2011. "Indian social democracy: The resource perspective," Working Papers 11/82, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Social trust; Welfare State;

    JEL classification:

    • Z13 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics - - - Economic Sociology; Economic Anthropology; Language; Social and Economic Stratification

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hhs:ratioi:0144. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Martin Korpi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ratiose.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.