Bowles, J. (2014) “Southern Europe is suspicious: the evolution of trust in the EU“, Bruegel Think Tank, 14 Μαΐου.
Analysis of the eurozone crisis and its consequences has started to consider its social, as well as political and economic, dimensions. Bruegel analysis, for example, has considered distributional challenges, effects on poverty levels, social security systems, and changes in confidence towards political institutions. Academic economic research into the significance of cultural values, such as trust, suggests a viable new route to consider some of these deep-rooted social consequences of Europe’s economic woes, and we seek here to sketch some stylised empirics. If we think that such social values are both economically important and that it is very hard to change them, then the findings are worrying. Economic crisis has been associated with a striking degradation in the levels of interpersonal trust in southern Europe.
In an often cited quote from 1972, Kenneth Arrow wrote that “Virtually every commercial transaction has within itself an element of trust … It can be plausibly argued that much of the economic backwardness in the world can be explained by the lack of mutual confidence”. The recent literature investigating the economic ‘payoff’ of trust in society stretches back most notably to Knack & Keefer (1997) and La Porta et al. (1997), who used measures of generalised trust to proxy for levels of social capital and test the connection to economic performance. However, since definitions of social capital vary significantly between disciplines, here we stick to the narrow importance of trust while acknowledging the link to social capital. Much of the economic literature empirically tests the connection between trust and economic performance using data from the World Values Survey (WVS), which asks “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?”
Σχετικές αναρτήσεις:
- Muro, D. & Vidal Lorda, G. (2014) “Persistent unemployment poses a substantive threat to democracy in Southern European countries“, London School of Economics and Political Science, 13 Μαρτίου 2014.
- Harteveld, E., (2013) “Fostering a European identity is unlikely to be a successful method for increasing citizens’ trust in the EU“, LSE European Politics and Policy Blog, 27 Νοεμβρίου.
- Exadaktylos, Th., Zahariadis, N., (2012) “Policy Implementation and Political Trust: Greece in the Age of Austerity“, Hellenic Observatory Papers on Greece and Southeast Europe, GreeSE Paper No. 65.