Social Capital and Crises with an Application to Iceland

Thorvaldur Gylfason

No 5423, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Economic growth is propelled in part by the accumulation of different kinds of capital, including social capital in its several guises. This paper considers the interplay between financial crises and various aspects of social capital which, if it is allowed to depreciate, can undermine economic prosperity and growth and possibly also contribute to crises. Specifically, the paper offers some empirical comparisons between the experience of the United States in the 1920s and in the 1990s until 2008 with the experience of Sweden and Iceland. The working hypothesis is that social capital decay can be a precursor as well as consequence of slow economic growth and of financial crises. Iceland is a case in point. An increasingly unfair distribution of income and wealth is likely to exacerbate the problem.

Keywords: social capital; inequality; corruption; trust; financial crises (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 D73 G01 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp5423.pdf (application/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:ces:ceswps:_5423

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().