Past Discussions and Current Evidence On the Importance of Social Capital

This paper intends to provide a summary of the emergence of social capital concept in the historical context. A special emphasis is given to the political and economic importance of social capital since many thinkers in the past are known to have expressed their ideas about the possible positive spillovers from social harmony to economic growth and political stability. Using contemporary data, the paper therefore conducts a simple statistical analysis, too. The findings of our simple analysis find statistically significant and positive relationship between the social capital level and growth in many of the emerging economies in accordance with the usual historical intellectual acceptance. However, it is the social capital across all the constituents in a society that affects the economic performance positively but not the social capital that generally comes into being naturally within smaller groups.