This paper investigates the relationship between the social capital and economic resilience of Italian provinces during the Great Recession. It focuses on social economy organizations' internal and external relational dimensions to proxy forms of bonding and bridging social capital. Through an econometric analysis, I find that indicators depicting the diffusion of volunteering and cooperative employment are positively related to a measure of resilience, confirming the hypothesis that social capital can shape local reactions to crises. I also find a negative relationship between the local resilience and social cooperatives' density, highlighting how the latter indicator does not seize virtuous forms of social capital.

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This paper investigates, through the lens of social capital, the contribution of social cooperation to the economic well‐being of Italian provinces. The empirical investigation is in two phases. First, I carry out a cross‐sectional analysis on data from 2015 to 2019 to verify whether social‐cooperation diffusion, expressed by social‐cooperative‐employee density, is positively related to a composite index of social capital. This analysis confirms the hypothesis that the diffusion of social cooperation effectively approximates the territorial social‐capital endowment. Second, I structure a panel data analysis for the period 2012 to 2017 to investigate the link between social cooperation as a source of social capital and the economic well‐being of Italian provinces. The results of this analysis corroborate the hypothesis—consistent with copious literature showing the positive role of social capital in the economic development processes—that social cooperation positively affects material living conditions through the generation of social value.