The Research Of The Impact Of Social Capital-on Chinese Residents' Consumption

Investment,consumption,import and export is the troika driving economic development.But in recent years,especially after the global financial crisis,our country economy enters the “New Normal”,on the one hand,inactive economic recovery all over the world and international trade protectionism make China's import and export trade growth lack of energy.On the other hand,the economic model driven by investment for a long time causes excess production capacity and the increase of government debt in China,etc.In such a context,expanding domestic demand,stimulating consumption becomes the key of China's economic growth.According to statistics,in 2015 China's import and export trade volume and total investment in fixed assets fell by 7% and 7% respectively compared to the same period,while the whole society total retail sales of consumer goods reached 30 trillion yuan,increased by 10.6% compared to the same period.At the same time,the internet consumption reached 3.8773 trillion yuan,accounting for 12.9% of total retail sales of social consumer goods.Final consumption contributes to the economic growth over 60%,becoming the primary motivation of stimulating economic growth in country.To strengthen the basic role of consumption playing in the economic growth,it has to be adapted to the trend of consumption upgrade,breaking policy barriers,optimizing consumption environment,protecting consumers' rights and interests.On one hand,the domestic consumer market should be improved on the institutional level.On the other hand,it is significant that more effective supplement should be supplied and pull the residents' consumption under the "New Normal" to build "new kinetic energy" of economic growth.At present,Chinese consumers are still troubled by rights and interests' protection problems,such as food safety.In terms of food safety,after the scandal of melamine,fake milk powder problem once again blows to the consumer confidence.Consumer confidence for domestic products,disperse more and more consumers to oversea market.In 2015 Chinese consume 1.2 trillion yuan on oversea products,growing by 16.7% from one year earlier.Chinese are so called "walking wallet".From milk powder to toilet cover,they are rushing on the rest of the world,reflecting Chinese consumers' doubt of domestic product quality.Low confidence seems to have become an important reason impeding further development of the domestic consumer market.So the research studying the relationship between residents' trust and consumption is especially realistic.Moreover,China is a nepotistic society.Every citizen is living in their own "social network".This unique cultural characteristic and the relationship in a "pattern of difference sequence" will inevitably affect consumers in choices.From "conspicuous consumption" to "comparative consumption",consumption choices of consumers can reveal the interpersonal network,we can define Chinese consumption as the consumption within the social network.So the Chinese interpersonal relationship(social network)has strong impact on the residents' consumption which is,in accordance with China's unique cultural characteristics and instinct.Last but not the least,according to the knowledge of the consumer behavior,in a specific consumption environment,consumer attitude and cognition to certain problems can also affect the choices of consumers.At present,our country is still in the economic reform.When social flow and information flow accelerating very fast on this development stage,the personal social cognition also are constantly changing in the rapidly changed social environment.The default "social norms" cultivated in the process also plays an important role in the residents' consumption.In this situation,the research of cognitive(social norms)influence on consumption is in accordance with the characteristics of economic development at the present stage in China.In short,in this paper,integrate the relevant theories of sociology,economics,political science and psychology to investigate problems of Chinese residents' consumption.The introduction of the concept "Social Capital" on the basis of using quantitative research methods,is to study social network,social trust and social norms for China's household consumption respectively.The crossover study provides a better understanding for rational expectations hypothesis in economics development bottlenecks,for further developing the theory of economy and for Chinese consumer behavior.This article is a brave attempt to the research,also a breakthrough to the existing consumption research framework.Especially with the economic development,when economic system reform continues,function of market economy is more and more complete and the developing of the research itself,it has great importance to attach various social science to economics.We just provide one solution.The rest of this paper is arranged as following: in the first chapter,we introduce the background and significance of this topic,as well as the concept,characteristics,measurement of social capital.Based on this,we formulate the research framework,content and methods.The second chapter summarizes the social capital economics research and the consumption problems of our country in recent years.The third chapter expounds the theoretical basis of this study.The fourth,fifth and the sixth chapters are the core of this article,studying the social network,social trust and social norms' s influence on Chinese residents' consumption respectively.The seventh chapter summarizes the full research and put forward the relevant policy recommendations.Innovation of this research are the followings: first,in terms of research perspectives,this paper chose a sociological perspective together with the knowledge of consumer behavior to study the consumer problem.We believe the crossover study will become a new trend along with the development of economics.Secondly,in terms of data,this article uses the existing publicly available database of micro household consumption,and the micro database overcomes the macro database's drawback,which cannot depict household consumption influenced by factors such as the family size of population,health conditions,etc.It shows the heterogeneity of the differences between different families.Third,in terms of research contents,this paper studies the social network,social trust and social norms' influence on household consumption.These produce some useful conclusions.For example,the study found that social network,social trust and decisive social norms are all affecting the household consumption,and these effects remains in a variety of robustness tests.In addition,the effect is different for different consumption levels of family,in addition to the obvious heterogeneity,such as the influence of social network on household consumption,the study found that the lowest level of consumption and the highest level of consumption group of social network own the strongest pulling effect on consumption.The effect of the heterogeneity for making government policy,understanding consumer behavior is of great significance.This paper tries to research putman's(2003)theory on the three dimensions of the definition of social capital influence on household consumption,although some beneficial conclusions are drawn,these are still insufficient.Due to a lack of a unified database,for example,the paper cannot measure the three dimensions of social capital in a database at the same time,as well as cannot compare the three factors' different influence on residents' consumption at the same time.Also due to the lack of micro database,the article can only be studied by the section data,although such studies have certain scientific nature,it cannot control the time effect of the database very well.These defects are also for further research in the future.