Working Paper: NBER ID: w19195
Authors: Kathy Baylis; Yazhen Gong; Shun Wang
Abstract: Social capital can facilitate community governance, but not all social capital is alike. We distinguish bonding social capital (within a village) from bridging social capital (between villages), and we compare their effects on the management of a common pool resource. We develop a theoretical model and show that bonding social capital can improve common pool resource management, while the effect of bridging social capital is mixed. We test these findings using primary data from Yunnan, China on social capital and firewood collection on communal lands. We find that bonding social capital decreases the consumption of the common pool resource, and bridging social capital erodes the effect of bonding. Bridging social capital also decreases the use of the common pool resource by villagers who are near subsistence levels of consumption. Our results are robust to alternative measures of social capital and to treating social capital as endogenous.
Keywords: Social Capital; Common Pool Resources; Community Governance; Yunnan, China
JEL Codes: O13; Q2; Q23; Q56
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| bonding social capital (Z13) | decrease consumption of firewood from communal lands (Q23) |
| bridging social capital (Z13) | mixed effect on consumption of firewood (Q23) |
| low levels of bonding social capital (Z13) | bridging social capital decreases consumption (Z13) |
| high levels of bonding social capital (Z13) | bridging social capital erodes positive impact (Z13) |
| households near subsistence levels (D19) | bridging social capital helps conserve CPR (Z13) |
| higher community bridging social capital (Z13) | increased overall CPR consumption (H56) |