Does social capital determine health? Evidence from eight transition countries

Abstract

This paper starts from an empirical assessment of different dimensions of social capital in the transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). The level of social capital is lower in CEE-CIS countries compared to other countries in Europe and beyond. We then use a unique data source to carefully investigate the impact of social capital on individual self-reported health for eight countries from the Commonwealth of Independent States (Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Ukraine). We rely on three indicators for social capital -individual degree of trust, participation in local organisations, social isolation -and employ alternative procedures to consistently estimate the impact of social capital on health. We attempt to circumvent the endogeneity problems by using instrumental variable estimates. Our results show that, in the overall sample comprising all eight countries, the individual degree of trust is positively and significantly correlated with health, either in pooling estimation or when we rely on IV estimators with community fixed effects. Similarly, social isolation is negatively and significantly associated with health, irrespective of the procedure of estimation. On the other hand, the effect of being member of a Putnamesque organisation is more ambiguous and usually not significantly related to health. Finally, country-estimates suggest that the impact of social capital on health varies across the eight countries. We argue that the positive effect of membership on health is conditional on the quality of the political institutions and civil liberties, while trust and social isolation seem to influence health independently of those institutional factors.ξ Views expressed in this paper are exclusively those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official views of the organisations they are affiliated with.

The Relationship Between Social Capital and Selfreported Health in China

“…-Community-level averages of SC variables (d'Hombres et al, 2010;Goryakin et al, 2013;Fiorillo and Sabatini, 2015) -Attendance at religious services (Schultz et al, 2008;Habibov and Weaver, 2014;Fiorillo and Sabatini, 2015) -Neighbors look out for each other (Howley, 2015) -Availability of public transportation (Ronconi et al, 2012) Two observations are noteworthy from Appendix B. First, a common IV is to take the average value of the respective SC variable at the "community" level.…”

The relationship between happiness and health: Evidence from Italy

“…Structural social capital can influence health in a number of ways. More intense social relationships may facilitate individuals' access to social support and health care, as well as the development of informal insurance arrangements (D'Hombres et al 2010). They can promote a more rapid diffusion of health information, increase the likelihood that healthy norms of behaviour are adopted (e.g., physical activity and usage of preventive services), and exert social control over deviant healthrelated behaviours (Kawachi et al 1999, Phelps 2000, Melchior et al 2003, Brown et al 2006, Folland 2007.…”

“…As mentioned above, our finding of a significant and positive correlation between social trust and happiness in the first stage of the instrumental variables probit (see section 3) supports the relevance of this instrument. As for the orthogonality condition, it must be stated that there are studies finding a positive effect of social trust on individual health (Poortinga 2006;De Silva et al 2007;Petrou et al 2008;d'Hombres et al 2010;Giordano and Lindstrom 2010), but they do not simultaneously include measures of happiness. Thus, the effect of social trust could be due to its positive correlation with happiness.…”

Workers’ health and social relations in Italy

“…It specifically aimed to investigate whether the workers' health benefits of social relations (as an indicator of structural social capital) are simultaneously individual and collective. In the literature, the association between structural social capital and health of populations is examined at either the individual level (D'Hombres et al 2010;Ronconi et al 2012), the aggregate level (Kawachi et al 1997(Kawachi et al , 1999 or both (Poortinga et al 2006a,b). This paper is an empirical contribution to the debate whether the health benefits of social capital are simultaneously individual and collective.…”