Social and economic development from an integrated sustainability perspective: analysing the interaction of social capital, income level, and income inequality in China

ABSTRACT This study aims to explore bilateral interactions of social and economic pillars of sustainability in China to reveal if they are synergistic or trade-off. To this end, this research uses the bootstrap method for panel data and an Ordinary Quantile Regression model to estimate the effects of social capital proxies including political identity, family relationship network and trust on economic condition proxy, household income, in different quantiles of Chinese households. This study uses data based on microsurvey data from the China Family Tracking Survey (CFPS) conducted by the China Social Science Research Center of Peking University in 2014, 2016 and 2018. The results show that social capital positively affects economic status implying the synergistic impact of social development on economic pillars of sustainable development. Moreover, further examination reveals that the resulted improvement in economic status is distributed equally among different quantiles of Chinese households. This result implies that the reflective effect of economic development on social pillar is synergistic. Overall, these findings accept the synergistic interactions between social and economic pillars of sustainability which is consistent with the integrated sustainability perspective. These findings suggest that policymakers in both the social and economic sectors to consider the consequences of their own plans and strategies for the other sectors.