Measuring Social Capital: Evidence from Italy

Abstract

This paper aims at three main goals: a) choosing proxies of social capital available at territorial level; b) defining the current geography of social capital endowment; c) correlating our synthetic measure of social capital with economic phenomena (e.g. industrial districts distribution). According to this analysis, the simple dualism between Northern and Southern Italy does not allow an exhaustive map of social capital geography in Italy. The so-called “Third Italy” regions – North-East and Tuscany especially – where the incidence of industrial districts is remarkable, are widely endowed with social capital, and, precisely, with the “macro” component of social capital, whose accumulation involves many people, favouring trust.