EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Measuring Social Capital in Italy: An Exploratory Analysis

Fabio Sabatini (aiccon@poloforli.unibo.it)
Additional contact information
Fabio Sabatini: Associazione Italiana per la Cultura della Cooperazione e del Non Profit, Postal: P.le della Vittoria, , 15 - 47100 Forli', , Italy, http://www.aiccon.it

No 12-2005, AICCON Working Papers from Associazione Italiana per la Cultura della Cooperazione e del Non Profit

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to trace a map of Italian local social capital endowments. It focuses on the structuraldimension of the concept, as identified with social networks. The analysis is based on a dataset collected by the author including about two hundred indicators of five main social capital dimensions: strong family ties, weak informal ties, voluntary organizations, civic awareness, and political participation. 51 key variables are selected for performing principal component analyses both on each of the five groups and on the entire dataset, in order to build latent indicators for every single social capitals dimension and for the concept as a whole. Finally, a multiple factor analysis is run on the entire dataset, in search of a single synthetic measure of social capital. A clear distinction emerges between bonding social capital, shaped by strong family ties, and bridging and linking social capital, shaped by weak ties among friends, neighboors and members in voluntary organizations. Areas characterized by high levels of bonding social capital can suffer from a lack of bridging and linking ties. The study provides a valuable synthetic indicator capturing the particular configuration of social capital which the literature generally associates with positive economic outcomes.

Keywords: Social capital; Social networks; Economic development; Principal component analysis; Multiple factor analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A12 O10 O18 R11 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2005-04-22
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.aiccon.it/file/convdoc/n.12.pdf Full text (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.aiccon.it/file/convdoc/n.12.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.aiccon.it/file/convdoc/n.12.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ris:aiccon:2005_012

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in AICCON Working Papers from Associazione Italiana per la Cultura della Cooperazione e del Non Profit Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Paolo Venturi (paolo.venturi7@unibo.it).

 
Page updated 2024-12-26
Handle: RePEc:ris:aiccon:2005_012