Household Social Capital And Household Income: Theoretical And Empirical

Recently there are disputes on the concept of social capital among scholars. Though a lot of differences they have in their interpretations, they all regard social capital as one form of capital together with physical capital and human capital, which includes trust, norms, and social networks. Social capital has its own characteristics: it has productivity, which can bring a stream of revenue; it can be accumulated in the process of use, and it has a strong value added capability; it has the nature of public goods and is not transferable; it is invisible capital. These characteristics determine its functions in the social economy. It has a very important impact on the development of human capital and the economy as a whole. Besides, the creation, preservation and disappearance of social capital need certain conditions.In Chinese culture family and kinship are put in an important position. So family is the core of social capital. Most social relations are actually extended or expanded from kinship, so it is very important to research household social capital in our country. Because the impact of social capital has a reflection on the household income, it makes sense to analyze the impact social capital has on the household income. There are not many literatures of empirical study on the relationship between household social capital and household income. Our research is hoping to promote the research in this field by providing some experience.The empirical research on the impact of social capital on household income involves an important issue of the measurement of social capital. Because social capital is composed of conceptions such as belief and trust, it is almost impossible to measure directly. So we need to introduce some proxies to substitute the social capital, and fortunately the concept of social capital and the category of the research subject have an important guiding effect. Based on the social capital theory and the analysis on the former research, we use four variables which are network size, social participation scale, social trust and network capstone to measure household social capital according to the...