Social Networks And Economic Development

Although the theory of social capital is embarrassed in the contemporary economic thoughts, social capital and its paradigm could be a breakthrough in area and methods of the recent economics. Based on the basic logic that social relations and social structure are a kind of accessible resource, along with the clue of hypothesis, normative analysis and empirical tests, this dissertation studies the economic benefit and development promotion of social networks as social capital.Based on review of the literatures, the dissertation finds that the large number of literatures took association and social network as the proxy of social capital. In fact, social capital is a mechanism of exchange of social resource among actors, which occurs depending on social network. Therefore, the output and utility of social capital depend on the networks which happen with social interaction. From the point of networks relationship, resulting from the different social preference and values, the strength of social network relations will provide different effects of ties. From the point of network structure, the actor's individual position in social network will decide the capacities of controlling other actors and resource, freedom of being not controlled by other actors. The structure of group network will decide the advantage of resource of network and its actors. As a kind of capital, the investment, maintaining of social network will cost time and other resource, and be affected by environment in which social network occurs.Based on the theory of social exchange, the dissertation constructs a binary relations model with social networks dependence relationship and social networks trust relationship. The dissertation finds that the effects of scarcity of substitute result into the dependence of among actors, which implies an actor or more predominating over others, the dependence relations among actors depends on this predominating power configuration, the dependence relations will maintain with repeated exchange, and thus cooperation will be possible. When the contracts can not regulate the relations among actors but exchange will benefit for them, trust relationship occurs. The evolution of trust preference is a tardy process, while the choice of actors is rapid. The equilibrium of tardy process and rapid choice depends on the trustful population size and the state of social trust relationship in networks.Based on the theory of social structure, the dissertation defines the social network structure as a kind of social capital, which is the possibilities and cognition of actors to access resource and society in network environment. The study finds that inclusiveness can generate social cohesion; actors will have more initiative to invest social capital in a inclusive economy system. The network inclusiveness influences the action and belief of actors to access to economy system and to invest social capital. In the constraints of information and complexity, the surplus of exchange depends on network inclusiveness and complexity of exchange environment.Based on the data of 36 counties in Zhejiang Province, the dissertation proposes the indicators of social network as social capital with the method of PCA, and measures and compares the social network as social capital of 36 counties in Zhejiang Province. The dissertation also modifies the GDP as an indicator of economic development, and proposes indicators of regional economic development. With SEM between social network as social capital and economic development, this study finds that social networks with different features as social capital have different directional and intensional effects on different aspects of economic development.The research goes out of confining of the grand methods of social capital, and clearly distinguishes social network as social capital with social capital itself. The research focuses no longer on the judgement of the effects of social capital on economic development, but adopts the discussion on the concrete mechanism rather than general analysis, which could be the innovation and enrichment of study of social network and social capital. The finds of the research on relationships between social networks as social capital with economic development could be an initial explanation, and have some theoretical and practical implication.