Data for: Does social capital matter for European regional growth?

Abstract of associated article: This paper analyzes the role of different elements of social capital in economic growth for a sample of 85 European regions during the period 1995–2008. Despite the remarkable progress that social capital and European regional economic growth literatures have experienced over the last two decades, initiatives combining the two are few, and entirely yet to come for the post-1990s period. Recent improvements in data availability allow this gap in the literature to be closed, since they enable the researcher to consider the traditionally disregarded Eastern and Central European (ECE) regions. This is particularly interesting, as they are all transition economies that recently joined the European Union, with relatively low levels of social capital. On the methodological side, we follow the Bayesian paradigm, which enables us to make direct inferences on the parameters to be estimated and deal with parameter uncertainty, leading to a deeper understanding of the relationships being investigated. In particular, we analyze three indicators of social capital, namely social trust, associational activities and social norms. Results suggest that the two former might have some implications for regional growth while social norms are a weaker predictor for growth.关联论文摘要：本文以1995-2008年间的85个欧洲地区为研究样本，分析了社会资本不同构成要素对经济增长的作用。尽管近二十年来，社会资本与欧洲地区经济增长两大研究领域均取得了长足进展，但将二者结合的研究仍寥寥无几，且1990年代后的相关研究尚完全空白。近年来数据可得性的提升填补了这一研究空白，得益于这些新增数据，研究者得以将此前常被忽略的中东欧（Eastern and Central European, ECE）地区纳入研究样本。这一研究视角极具价值，因为这些地区均为近年加入欧盟的转型经济体，社会资本水平普遍偏低。在方法论层面，本文采用贝叶斯范式，可直接对待估参数进行推断并处理参数不确定性问题，进而更深入地剖析所研究的变量关联。具体而言，本文分析了三类社会资本指标：社会信任、社团活动与社会规范。研究结果表明，前两类指标对地区经济增长或存在一定影响，而社会规范作为经济增长的预测因子，其解释力则相对较弱。