Social capital and economic performance in post-communist societies

Social capital has received increasing attention as a crucial variable influencing economic performance (Knack and Keefer 1997; Dasgupta and Serageldin 1999). Particularly, the widely divergent and often disappointing results in the transition from a centrally planned to a market economy have been explained by variations in the stock of social capital (Nowotny 1998; Stiglitz 1999). Such efforts, however, have so far failed to take into account the differences in the definitions and concepts of social capital as they have emerged in the sociological and political literature (Tardos 1998). Moreover, for the transition economies at least, the weight ascribed to social capital in explaining the variations in economic performance stands in stark contrast to the dearth of empirical evidence that would support such conclusions.