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The Role of Community and Individuals in the Formation of Social Capital

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Abstract

Because social capital shapes many desirable socioeconomic outcomes, we ask what incentives drive private investments in social capital. We estimate the association between private investments in social capital (outcome variable) and the following explanatory variables: (a) individual-level variables from an optimal investment model, (b) spillovers from group social capital, (c) village income inequality, and (d) market openness. We draw on information from Tsimane’, a native Amazonian society of foragers and farmers in Bolivia, and equate social capital with gifts, help given, and communal labor offered by the household. Age bore an inverted U-shaped and income bore a positive association with social capital, but geographic mobility, wealth, and schooling bore no significant association with social capital. We found strong group-level associations even after instrumenting social capital; the association probably stems from strong kinship ties which tend to blur the line between the group and the individual. Village measures of social capital were positively and significantly associated with private investments in social capital. We found some evidence that village income inequality and market openness were negatively associated with private investments in social capital.

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Acknowledgements

Research was funded by two grants from the National Science Foundation (SBR-9731240 and SBR-9904318), a grant from the World Bank as part of the World Bank-Netherlands Partnership Program on Learning and Research Program on Culture and Poverty, and a grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation to Reyes-García (GR-7250). Thanks to M. Gurven for commenting on portions of the ethnographic section and to three anonymous reviewers of Human Ecology for providing insightful critiques of an earlier draft.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sustainable International Development (SID) Program, MS 078, Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, 02454-9110, USA

    Ricardo Godoy, Tomás Huanca, Ramona G. Olvera, Jonathan Bauchet, Zhao Ma, Jonathan St. John, Marisa Miodowski, Oscar Zapata Rios, Vincent Vadez & Craig Seyfreid

  2. Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambiental, Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona, Bellatera, Barcelona, Spain

    Victoria Reyes-García

  3. Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

    William R. Leonard

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  1. Ricardo Godoy
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  2. Victoria Reyes-García
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  3. Tomás Huanca
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  4. William R. Leonard
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  5. Ramona G. Olvera
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  6. Jonathan Bauchet
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  7. Zhao Ma
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  12. Craig Seyfreid
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Correspondence to Ricardo Godoy.

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Godoy, R., Reyes-García, V., Huanca, T. et al. The Role of Community and Individuals in the Formation of Social Capital. Hum Ecol 35, 709–721 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-006-9106-1

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