Social Capital And Regional Economic Growth:a Theoretical Framework And Its Application In Chinese Context

Contractible area difference, implementation region economy coordinated development has always been basic guidelines and goals of China regional development policy for the central government. The Third Plenary Session of the 16th Party Central Committee put forward the conception of scientific development of the people-oriented, comprehensive, coordinated, sustainable development, and emphasize "Five Unifications", in which overall regional economic development occupies a very important position; October in 2010 ,The Fifth Plenary Session of the 17th Party Central Committee pass through?Recommendations on Formulating the 12th Five-Year Plan for national economic and social development?so as to further promote balanced regional development, deepen the implementation of the overall regional development strategy and the strategy of the main functional areas as a major strategic task of entirely building up well-to-do society and accelerating to push the construction of modernization. Traditionally, people mainly analyses the difference of China's regional economic development from the"material capital difference theory","human capital difference theory"," geographical location difference theory","regional policy difference theory", They pay more attention to hardware construction and software design of policy for government services, but Ignore the impact of" social factors" to regional economic growth. This paper attempts from the perspective of nurturing and management social capital to analyze the effect of social network and social cultural environment in regional economic growth to regional economic entities's behavior activity, systematically study social capital role in the regional economic growth.The research object of this paper is not the regional economic growth of the traditional sense, but a policy thought how to develop social support system for promoting regional economic growth, or a social policy of social culture development to promote regional economic growth, which more involve in the social network construction and regional economic entity's interactive in regional development, and try to deconstruction social factors of regional economic growth from the.new economic sociology perspective. This article proceeds its study on logical thought and technical route of following "Question -- Constructing Theoretical Framework -- Empirical Test -- solving the problem" in order to establish a systematic framework for resolving the issue of social capital affect the regional economic growth. This dissertation is divided into nine chapters.The first chapter is the introduction. It explains the background, research purpose and research value of this dissertation, and made clear the core concepts,research methods, research technique route and structure arrangement, finally gives the innovation and deficiency of this dissertation as well.The second chapter is a literature review. It firstly sort out the development context of the social capital according to the time order, and then to summarize the research content of social capital, subsequent to sort out the theory of economic growth by endogenous development; then to sort out the literature of regional economy growth according to the time order, and then to generalize and evaluate the major regional economic growth theory; Finally, further to sort out the domestic and foreign literature for researching the relation between social capital and regional economic growth in order to find research context and further study as the basis.The third chapter is an analysis framework of this dissertation. It intends to explain how to study of the relation between social capital and regional economic growth. The first section firstly analyzes the reasons for introducing social capital to explain regional economic growth. This article discuss from three aspects: the social capital theory may make up the hypothesis of new classical economics, is a research for non-economic factors in economic growth theory, and is the third kinds of means for allocating social resources. The second section presents analysis framework of this dissertation. It explains how the social capital affects regional economic growth. To understand the mechanism of social capital we firstly need to classification of social capital. The article thinks, the social capital may be divided into micro, meso and macro three levels from the angle of system theory, among them Micro-level social capital focuses on the micro-individual(corporate) self potential to mobilize resources through social networks;Meso-level social capital focused on the specific structure of the network of social capital; Macro-level of social capital focuses on the manner the specific social capital network contained in the greater political and economic system, as well as the mode contained in the social cultural or normative system. Then in the subsequent section, the article discusses that the three levels of social capital affect regional enterprise development, regional industrial clusters and regional environmental optimization so as to promote regional economic growth.The fourth chapter discusses the micro mechanism social capital on regional economic growth. In this chapter, the author analyzes the positive impact of corporate social capital for the business performance from the study of corporate social capital perspective. The first section, the author firstly introduced the enterprise social capital's connotation and analysis dimension. Subsequently three sections, the author discusses corporate social capital on firm performance fromthe role of corporate social capital in the enterprises' technological innovation,corporate finance and corporate governance.The fifth chapter discusses the medium mechanism social capital on regional economic growth. In this chapter, the author uses regional industry cluster social capital as an example, analyzes the role of social capital in the industrial clusters'formation and development,and pointes out that social trust, relation network and system of rules as the important content of social capital play a vital role in the formation and development of industrial clusters. The first section, this article firstly introduced the connotation, the characteristic and the classification of industrial cluster, Subsequently two sections, the author is respectively introduced social capital' function on the industrial clusters' formation and development.The sixth chapter discusses the macro mechanism social capital on regional economic growth. This chapter discusses the mechanism of social capital on regional economic growth from three respects of the macro-level of social capital such as regional trust, regional culture, and social system. the macro-level of social capital mainly affects regional economic growth in three aspect: It may create an environment conducive to economic development of the region market environment, regional innovation environment and regional institutional environment through regional trust, regional culture and regional social system the main economic activities, and create a good trust, cooperative atmosphere. The first section, we research social capital on the regional economic growth from the whole regional social environment. The author thinks, social capital is a characterization of regional social environment, is a soft index measuring regional economic growth environment. The social capital as an organization resource within the region, which contains the regional social trust system, regional social norms, regional social relationship network, regional culture, regional history and regional identity can comprehensively reflect the fundamentals of regional social environment. The subsequent three sections respectively expounds the effects and mechanisms of the social trust on the regional market environment,social culture on the regional innovation environment and the social system on regional environmental optimization.The seventh chapter is the empirical test between social capital and regional economic growth. This first section in this chapter, the author firstly used the fifth waves of the World Values Survey (WVS) data to statistically analyze the relationship between social trusts, social participation as two important indicators of social capital and economic growth. In the second section, the author using domestic survey data analysis the relationship between social trust, social participation and provinces (autonomous regions) economic growth. In the second section, the author uses a specific regional as an example, through the analysis of Zhejiang Wenzhou area's the level of social capital and Wenzhou economic growth,empirically test social capital on regional economic growth, which verifies the theoretical framework.The eighth chapter is social capital countermeasure in China's regional economic growth. This chapter put forward three respects countermeasure of promoting the development of social capital from cultivating Macro-level of social capital to optimize the regional environmental construction; cultivating Meso-level of social capital to promote regional industrial clusters' formation and development; cultivating Micro-level of social capital to promote regional corporate performance.The ninth chapter is the conclusion of this dissertation. It mainly sort out and summarize the main points of this article.The dissertation has the following innovations:?From the topics of view, The dissertation researches regional economic growth selecting from the perspective of social capital, and enrich the study of regional economic growth. Previous research to the regional economy growth mainly concentrated on the analysis of the material capital, human capital, regional location and the regional preferential policies, researching regional economic growth from the perspective of social capital in domestic and foreign literature does not see more, still belong to a comparison new research field. so the study has enriched the regional economic growth research.?From the frame of the dissertation, theoretical research on social capital and regional economic growth at home and abroad is still lacking, has not formed a completely theoretical system. The dissertation regards social capital as a mode of allocation resources, building research framework from the macro, meso, micro three levels to analyze the relation between social capital and regional economic growth, and openning up a new perspective of economic sociology for the regional policy design, and forming a complete research framework, so there is a certain degree of innovation in theory.?From the empirical research method, the dissertation uses cross-national and inter-provincial data,comparatively analyzing the relationship between social capital and economic growth in different countries (regions). In addition, the dissertation also bases on China's unique cultural background, regarding Wenzhou in Zhejiang region's as a case, and empirically test the role of social capital on regional economic growth,with strong representation, and develop this area theoretical research.?From the proposed countermeasures, the dissertation combines regional economic growth policy design and some new concepts the Party Central Committee put forward such as concept of scientific development,building a harmonious society etc. To introduce social credit system construction and cultural development strategy for social capital framework, respectively, the dissertation puts forward three respects countermeasure of promoting the development of social capital from cultivating Macro-level of social capital to optimize the regional environmental construction; cultivating Meso-level of social capital to promote regional industrial clusters' formation and development; cultivating Micro-level of social capital to promote regional corporate performance. These advices provide a new thinking for local government departments to use social capital for solving the problem of regional economic growth.Although the dissertation detail analyzes the social capital role in the regional economic growth, and draws some convincing and reference value conclusions and recommendations However, due to limited time, energy and the difficulty of data collection,the dissertation has some obvious limitations and shortcomings,mainly in:?The theory innovation is not perfect. Although the dissertation puts forward a new theoretical framework, but is still relatively coarse, not fine enough. In this theoretical framework, social capital and regional economic development environment,social capital and regional business development,social capital and regional industrial cluster, respectively, can also and will still need to do more in-depth analysis.?Empirical studies are not deep enough. On the one hand, It is reflected in the measure of social capital is not accurate enough. Although we only test social capital and regional economic growth by a simple descriptive statistics, but to the social capital, It is described only by using social trust and social participation two index ( structure and cognitive ) to measure, thus it may not be a true reflection of social capital and regional economic growth. On the other hand, the dissertation can not construct a social capital index system which can separately apply to the macro, meso and micro level. We know, To empirical analysis of the role of social capital, the best choice should be to establish a set of social capital index system which applies to macro, meso and micro levels in order to achieve social capital.However, due to difficulties in obtaining the relevant information about social capital index system in foreign,and domestic literature is lack of relevant research,So this article can not construct a set of social capital index system respectively reflect the social capital of macro, meso and micro level, and makes it difficult to research social capital role in the relationship between regional enterprises,regional industry and regional economic growth.