Premium
Building Trust? Conditional Cash Transfer Programmes and Social Capital *
Author(s) -
Attanasio Orazio,
Pellerano Luca,
Reyes Sandra Polanía
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
fiscal studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.63
H-Index - 40
eISSN - 1475-5890
pISSN - 0143-5671
DOI - 10.1111/j.1475-5890.2009.00092.x
Subject(s) - public good , social capital , public goods game , conditional cash transfer , economics , capital (architecture) , cash , measure (data warehouse) , public economics , control (management) , transfer (computing) , microeconomics , cash transfers , sociology , finance , economic growth , computer science , geography , social science , poverty , management , archaeology , database , parallel computing
In this paper, we propose a measure of social capital based on behaviour in a public goods game. We conducted a public goods game within 28 groups in two similar neighbourhoods in Cartagena, Colombia, one of which had been targeted for over two years by a conditional cash transfer programme that has an important social component. The level of cooperation we observe in the ‘treatment’ community is considerably higher than that in the ‘control’ community. The two neighbourhoods, however, although similar in many dimensions, turn out to be significantly different in other observable variables. The result we obtain in terms of cooperation, however, is robust to controls for these observable differences. We also compare our measure of social capital with other more traditional measures that have been used in the literature.