Le determinanti del capitale sociale in Italia, 1993-2000: una analisi esplorativa

This paper studies the accumulation of social capital in Italy in the light of Durlauf’s (2002) econometric approach. Social interactions are taken as a robust definition of social capital. The following empirical proxies are used: active and passive participation in various kinds of organisations and frequency of contact with friends. In order to merge information from different datasets, such as ISTAT’s (Italian Central Statistical Office) Multiscopo survey and Bank of Italy’s SHIW (Household Surveys of Income and Wealth), a statistical matching methodology is implemented to build pseudo panel data. The main results can be summed up as follows. Firstly, unlike in previous works for the US (Alesina and La Ferrara, 1999; Costa and Khan, 2001), income inequality is found not to matter for the accumulation of social capital. Secondly, participation turns out to be a “normal good”, like in Alesina and La Ferrara (1999), as active and passive participation is positively related to median regional household income. Finally, some potential instrumental variables correlated with social capital accumulation and uncorrelated with household income are found, possibly providing means to deal with Durlauf’s econometric identification problem.