Social capital or social cohesion: what matters for subjective well-being (SWB)?

Carlo Klein

No 2011-36, LISER Working Paper Series from Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER)

Abstract: The theoretical analysis of the concepts of social capital and of social cohesion shows that social capital should be considered as a micro concept whereas social cohesion, being a broader concept than social capital, is a more appropriate concept for macro analysis. Therefore, we suggest that data on the individual level should only be used to analyze the relationship between social capital, social cohesion indicators and subjective well-being and that they do not allow commenting on the level of social cohesion in a society. For this last type of analyses aggregated indicators of social cohesion have to be computed which is not the issue of this paper. Our empirical analysis is based on individual data for Luxembourg in 2008. In general, our results suggest that investments in social capital generate monetary returns (increased income) and psychic returns (increased SWB) even in a highly developed and multicultural country like Luxembourg. When we are adding on the micro level variables representing the economic domain of social cohesion following Bernard (1999), then we observe that this domain also has an effect on income and on SWB. Therefore, we recommend including the economic domain in any future analysis using the concept of social cohesion.

Keywords: social capital; social cohesion; subjective well-being; EVS 2008 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A10 D10 I30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2011-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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