信任及其解释:来自中国的跨省调查分析

“信任”被普遍认为是除物质资本和人力资本之外决定一个国家经济增长和社会进步的主要社会资本。华人社会在许多跨文化研究中被认为是低信任度的社会 ,而在国内 ,许多学者已用“信任危机”概括人与人关系的现状。本文试图通过中国跨省的信任调查数据 ,揭示信任对一个地区的经济绩效 ,例如企业规模、企业发展速度、引进外资等的影响 ,进一步分析影响信任的因素。我们的发现表明 ,一个地区能否被人们所信任与地域文化并不紧密相关 ,更重要的是跟人们之间的交易被重复的可能性、交易的发达程度、教育水平等因素有关。这些证据支持了经济学理论中关于重复博弈导致信任的基本假说。

Trust in China: A Cross-Regional Analysis

Trust has been widely recognized as “social capital”, a very important determinant for economic growth and social progress, complementary to physical capital and human capital. It is often argued that Chinese communities are low trust ones and China is now in “trust crisis”. Using a cross regional survey, this paper analyzes how trust affects regional economic performances such as GDP growth rate, size distribution of the firms, FDI inflow in China. The paper also shows that cross regional differences in trust depends on possibilities of repeated transactions, marketization, transportation facilities, education, size of government officials, and so on.