Declining trust in growing China: A dilemma between growth and socio-economic damage

Shuanping Dai and Wolfram Elsner

No 101/2015, Working Papers on East Asian Studies from University of Duisburg-Essen, Institute of East Asian Studies IN-EAST

Abstract: Declining general trust has become a serious social issue in China in recent years. This paper attempts to understand and analyze this social phenomenon from a social interaction perspective. Based on a repeated prisoners´ dilemma game on networks, it finds that the evolution of general trust is dependent on changes of the social interaction structure, and the increases of both social and spatial distance may explain a decrease of the levels of cooperation and general trust. In addition, we find that the traditional Chinese family and clan networks culture has an ambiguous effect on general trust, and simple reactive social "homing behavior" might be critical for China´s future economic development. In order to recover the general trust level, a major strategic option for China, and for fast growing countries in economic transition in general, is to (re-)develop appropriate network structures and properties, as our model indicates.

Keywords: economic transition; growth and development; migration; trust; games on networks; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B52 C72 D01 D02 D30 E24 O17 O43 O53 P21 Z10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna, nep-gro, nep-hme, nep-mac, nep-soc and nep-tra
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/109976/1/823908763.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:zbw:udedao:1012015

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers on East Asian Studies from University of Duisburg-Essen, Institute of East Asian Studies IN-EAST Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().