ABSTRACT
The economic and sociological literature knows many different definitions of social capital (see e.g. Van Dijk 1997, Serageldin and Grootaert 1999, Dasgupta 1999, Lin 1999, Paldam and Svendsen herein). For the purpose of our investigation the following description suffices. To be regarded as capital in the usual economic sense social capital needs to satisfy at least to basic requirements. First, its creation entails a sacrifice of resources. Second, it is expected to generate a stream of benefits in the future. What distinguishes social capital from human capital and physical capital is that the expected flow of future benefits relates to beneficial actions originating from others outside the realm of markets for goods and services. Its constituents-comparable to the physical goods in the case of real capital-are those features of social interaction that can improve efficiency by facilitating coordinated cooperative actions (see Putnam, Leonardi, and Nanetti 1994). One can think of norms and networks but also of trust, reciprocal behavior and other social mechanisms with such a property. The value of the current social capital stock equals the present value of the flow of benefits that it will generate in the future, while positive social capital is created only if the net (of resource cost) additional present value is positive.
