EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Social network capital, economic mobility and poverty traps

Sommarat Chantarat and Christopher Barrett

The Journal of Economic Inequality, 2012, vol. 10, issue 3, 299-342

Abstract: This paper explores the role social network capital might play in facilitating poor agents’ escape from poverty traps. We model and simulate endogenous link formation among households heterogeneously endowed with both traditional and social network capital who make investment and technology choices over time in the absence of financial markets and faced with multiple production technologies featuring different fixed costs and returns. We show that social network capital can either complement or substitute for productive assets in facilitating some poor households’ escape from poverty. However, the voluntary nature of costly link formation also creates exclusionary mechanisms that impede some poor households’ use of social network capital. Through numerical simulation, we show that the ameliorative potential of social networks therefore depends fundamentally on the broader socio-economic wealth distribution in the economy, which determines the feasibility of social interactions and the net intertemporal benefits resulting from endogenous network formation. In some settings, targeted public transfers to the poor can crowd-in private resources by inducing new social links that the poor can exploit to escape from poverty. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC. 2012

Keywords: Social network capital; Endogenous network formation; Poverty traps; Multiple equilibria; Social isolation; Social exclusion; Crowding-in transfer; D85; I32; O12; Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10888-011-9164-5 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Social Network Capital, Economic Mobility and Poverty Traps (2008) Downloads
Working Paper: Social Network Capital, Economic Mobility and Poverty Traps (2007) Downloads
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:kap:jecinq:v:10:y:2012:i:3:p:299-342

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... th/journal/10888/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10888-011-9164-5

Access Statistics for this article

The Journal of Economic Inequality is currently edited by Stephen Jenkins

More articles in The Journal of Economic Inequality from Springer, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-27
Handle: RePEc:kap:jecinq:v:10:y:2012:i:3:p:299-342