阿根廷的收入、财富和社会化：个人的激发性反应

tjpSsa. aI POLICY RESEARCH WORKING PAPER 2821 Income, Wealth, and Socialization in Argentina Provocative Responses from Individuals Daniel Lederman The World Bank Latin America and the Caribbean Region Office of the Chief Economist April 2002  | POLICY RESEARCH WORKING PAPER 2821 Abstract Lederman focuses on two objectives in his study: (1) to In contrast, the main determinants of trust are age and establish a baseline measurement of the level and age squared (but with opposite signs to those exhibited geographic distribution of social capital in Argentina, and by probability of participation), household wealth (but (2) to identify its empirical determinants. not its squared term nor household income), The study's survey questionnaire provides individual- participation (as shown by the Seemingly Unrelated level data on the population's participation in social Regressions Probit results on the cross-correlation organizations and willingness to trust members of its between the two social capital models), and community community. Probit models are estimated to explain the or provincial unemployment rates and income inequality. individual's decision to participate and to trust strangers, It is noteworthy that the common question on trust used and individual-household and community characteristics in the U.S. General Social Survey and in the World are used as explanatory variables. Potential simultaneity Values Survey yields results whereby communities with and endogeneity problems afflicting the empirical models higher "trust" rates actually have lower social are examined. participation rates. The main determinants of the probability of Finally, participation in organizations with participation in Argentina are age, age squared, participatory leadership selection mechanisms are more household income (and perhaps income squared), rural likely to produce interpersonal trust than other forms of communities (perhaps due to lower probabilities of participation. migration among rural residents since most migrants live in urban centers), community or provincial unemployment rates, and individual trust. This paper-a product of the Office of the Chief Economist, Latin America and the Caribbean Region-is part of a larger effort in the region to understand the causes and consequences of social capital. Copies of the paper are available free from the World Bank, 1818 H Street NW, Washington, DC 20433. Please contact Patricia Soto, room 18-018, telephone 202- 473-7892, fax 202-522-7528, email address psoto@worldbank.org. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://econ.worldbank.org. The author may be contacted at dledermanQworldbank.org. April2002. (51 pages) The Policy Researcb Workng Paper Seroes disseminates the findings oe work in progress to encourage the efchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the view of the World Bank, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represent. Produced by the Research Advisory Staff  Income, Wealth, and Socialization in Argentina: Provocative Responses from Individuals Daniel Lederman' Office of the Chief Economist LCR, World Bank JEL Classification: N3, 01, ZO. 1 The opinions expressed in this paper do not represent the views of the World Bank. The team at Sofres-Ibope, Argentina, led by Enrique Zuleta, did a wonderful job with the implementation of the survey, and I thank them for their contributions to the design of the survey. Irene Novacovsky and Sandra Cessilini also provided useful guidance for the design and implementation of the survey in Argentina. Ana Maria Menendez provided research assistance in the initial stages. Kathy Bain, Robert Cull, Wendy Cunningham, Norman Hicks, Guillermo Perry, Norbert Schady, Claudia Sepulveda, and Maurice Schiff provided useful comments.   I. Introduction The number of articles and books on social capital has exploded in recent years. Robert Putnam's seminal work on social participation in the United States was finally published in 2000, but this work and his now famous work on Italian civic engagement are cited frequently (see Putnam 2000 and 1993). Coleman's (1990, chapter 12) definition of social capital is now a staple for rational choice social scientists. Economists have jumped on the bandwagon by studying the effects of "social capital" on various economic and social phenomena, including economic growth across countries (Knack and Keefer 1997; Zak and Knack 1998), village incomes in an African country (Narayan and Pritchet 1999), violent crime rates across countries (Lederman et al. 2001), and financial development within Italy (Guiso et al. 2000).2 Most studies use measures of "interpersonal trust" and "participation in social organizations" as proxies for "social capital." Instead of looking at the effects of social capital on economic and social outcomes, this study has two different objectives. One objective is to establish a baseline measurement of the level and geographic distribution of social capital in Argentina. The hope is that this measurement exercise will be replicated in a few years to monitor progress in the accumulation of social capital. The questionnaire designed for this study was applied to a national and regionally (in six geographic regions) representative sample of Argentine households. The sample was also representative of rural and urban communities. The number of responding households totaled 2235. The survey was implemented during May-June 2000. A second objective follows a recent trend in the economics literature. This study attempts to clarify conceptually the meaning of "social capital" based on economic concepts and to 2 Although most analysts find benign effects from social capital, there are a few skeptical views. Some argue that social capital is not a substitute for good governance by the state (Bowles 1999) and that not all forms of social 2  explore its possible empirical determinants at the level of the individual. Knack and Keefer (1997) contributed to this line of inquiry by estimating correlations between aggregate (national) measures of social capital and various institutional and economic variables. Political scientists have also contributed to this line of research using individual-level data. Brehm and Rahn (1997) demonstrated, using individual-level data from the U.S., that confidence in public institutions, civic engagement and interpersonal trust are interrelated. More recent contributions to the economics literature on the determinants of social capital in the U.S. are DiPasquale and Glaeser (1998), Glaeser et al. (1999), and Alesina and La Ferrara (2000 and 1999). There are very few studies of the determinants of social capital in developing countries.3 Studies that explain individuals' decisions to trust other community members and to participate in social organizations are interesting not only for academics but also for policymakers. Such studies contribute to policy discussions by contributing to our understanding of the accumulation of social capital: By understanding the determinants of social capital we might be able to design economic and social policies that promote socially benign social capital. The main determinants of the probability of participation in Argentina are age, age squared, household income (and perhaps income squared), rural communities (perhaps due to lower probabilities of migration among rural residents, since most migrants live in urban centers), perhaps community or provincial unemployment rates, and the individual's trust itself. In contrast, the main determinants of trust are age and age squared, but with the opposite signs to those exhibited by probability of participation, household wealth (but not its squared term nor household income), participation itself (as demonstrated by the SUR Probit results concerning capital, which benefit some groups at the expense of others, are necessarily benign (see Rubio 1997; Durlauf 1999; Portes and Landolt 2000; Lederman et al. 2001). 3Narayan and Pritchett (1999) studied the effect of social capital on incomes across villages in Tanzania. Schady (2000) studied the determinants of volunteerism in rural Peru. 3  the cross-correlation between the two social capital models), and especially the community or provincial unemployment rates and income inequality. These results are consistent with the predictions of a simple economic model of the determinants of social capital, where participation is a flow variable, while trust is a stock variable. The findings of this study have some important policy implications. First, it is important to promote social participation through economic policies that increase employment opportunities and income growth. Second, high levels of social participation at the community level augment individual trust, but social organizations should make special efforts to establish participatory leadership selection procedures. Finally, improving the share of income of the poorest, relative to the richest quintile, is likely to lead to increased levels of trust within Argentine society. The rest of this study is organized as follows. Section II revisits concepts and measurement issues related to "social capital" by focusing on interpersonal "trust" and participation in social organizations. In addition, this section describes the survey questions used to measure these two types of social capital. Section III starts with a description of the levels and geographic distribution of aggregate measures of social capital across Argentine regions. The analysis then turns towards the structure of Argentine social capital by looking at aggregate participation rates in different types of social organizations. The types of organizations differ in terms of the level of internal participation by members, the types of leadership control structures, and other organizational features. Subsequently, the focus turns to a comparison of three different aggregate measures of "trust," which differ by the type of survey question used to construct each variable. Section IV presents a very simple economic model of social capital formation at the individual level, which serves as the guide for the specification of the econometric models. Section V discusses the estimation strategy, including two complications regarding the 4  potentially simultaneous determination of the probability of participation and trust, as well as the potential endogeneity of some key explanatory variables. Section VI discusses the basic Probit results, while Section VII presents the results from SUR Probit regressions and TS-Probit regressions. Section VIII summarizes the findings and policy recommendations. II. Concepts and Measurement of Social Capital Social capital has been broadly defined as the set of rules, norms, obligations, reciprocity, and trust embedded in social relations, social structures, and society's institutional arrangements, which enable members to achieve their individual and community objectives (Coleman 1990; Narayan 1997). According to Portes and Landolt (2000, 532) "the definition of social capital as the ability to secure resources by virtue of membership in social networks or larger social structures represents the most widely accepted definition of the term today." Nevertheless, social capital is not a homogeneous concept but comprises various social elements that promote individual and collective action. It follows from this complexity that measuring social capital is problematic. Nevertheless, researchers have used --with varying degrees of success-- indicators of social capital based on people's participation in social organizations and the sense of trust among community members. For economists, it is useful to draw analogies between physical and human capital and social capital. Coleman (1990, 304-305) put it in the following terms: "Just as physical capital is created by making changes in materials so as to form tools that facilitate production, human capital is created by changing persons so as to give them skills and capabilities... Social capital, in turn, is created when the relations among persons 5  change in ways that facilitate [collective] action... The function identified by the concept 'social capital' is the value of those aspects of social structure to actors, as resources that can be used... to realize their interests." But this description of social capital does not establish the reasons why social interactions can produce useful resources for individuals. Coleman's argument is that social interactions, especially repeated interactions, produce obligations and expectations among individuals (Coleman 1990, 306). In the words of Brehm and Rahn (1997, 1001-1002), "The more that citizens participate in their communities, the more that they learn to trust others; the greater the trust citizens hold for others, the more likely they are to participate." It is noteworthy that almost three decades ago, one of the creators of modern welfare economics, Kenneth Arrow, recognized the critical role of interpersonal trust: "In the absence of trust... opportunities for mutually beneficial cooperation would have to be forgone... norms of social behavior... [may be] reactions of society to compensate for market failures (Arrow 1971, 22)."4 That is, from an economic viewpoint, social interactions can result in the establishment of norms -- or Coleman's obligations and expectations -- to satisfy the need to establish rules of behavior that are not automatically imposed by markets. Hence social capital can be seen as a social outcome that overcomes a market failure. While government is supposed to regulate the behavior of economic agents so that markets work better, repeated social interactions can also shape individual behavior so that markets work better. Likewise, government regulation of individual behavior can help promote social participation and consequently the formation of interpersonal trust. Figure 1 reproduces the schematic representation of the relationship between confidence in government, social participation and trust presented by Brehm and Rahn (1997). This rough 6  model is useful to illustrate the complex relationships that may exist between these three concepts. Although it is difficult to control for the three community-level variables depicted in Figure 1, this study examines the determinants of social participation and trust at the individual level while controlling for the plausible correlation that might exits between these two variables. This issue is discussed in detail in the section about complications affecting the econometric estimation strategy. A later section of this paper presents a more detailed economic model of social capital formation by individuals, which shows how self-interest can lead individuals to participate in social organizations. III. The Level and Structure of Social Capital in Argentina A. Survey questions on social capital Until recently, most research focused on aggregate outcomes of social capital, such as overall participation rates in social organizations (see Putnam 2000). In the United States, the workhorse for most empirical studies of social capital are the General Social Surveys (GSS), which ask individuals the following relevant questions: (1) "Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can't be too careful in dealing with people?" (2) The GSS questionnaire includes questions regarding the respondents' membership in organizations such as political groups, religious organizations, unions, school associations, etc. Another survey that has been tested internationally is the World Values Surveys (WVS), sponsored by the University of Michigan in several countries around the globe, especially in industrialized 4This reference appears in Bowles (1999). 7  countries and East and Central Europe. The relevant questions in the WV\S are virtually identical to the GSS. This approach has been questioned recently. Experimental evidence provided by Glaeser et al. (1999) shows that the question on interpersonal trust is not a good predictor of whether an individual will actually trust a stranger. The answers to this question seem to be more closely related to the respondent's perception of his or her own trustworthiness, thus producing a mis- identification problem. Glaeser and his co-authors warn their readers about aggregation problems when using the individual-level responses to the general trust question. IThe concern is that the sum of positive responses on trustworthiness may not be a good aggregate approximation to the stock of social capital in a community, because trusting untrustworthy individuals may hurt naive trustworthy individuals. The aggregate stock of social capital of a community should consider both positive and negative externalities that are difficult to ascertain and measure. At this time, there are no studies that provide methods for resolving this issue. Hence we opted to use different questions about interpersonal trust in an attempt to identify trust rather than trustworthiness. When aggregating the responses we simply added the positive responses and divided by the sample size to derive the trust rate, thus ignoring externalities. Some of the econometric results presented below seem to show that one of the questions used in the survey to some extent resolves the mis-identification problem. The quantitative analysis to be presented below relies on three questions on trust. The first one (Trust I) is a hypothetical: "If you had to leave suddenly, whom could you trust to take care of delicate matters, such as your home, children or a dependent adult?" The respondent is presented with a set of options that includes family members. A respondent was considered to trust others if he or she answered that they could rely on someone other than a family member. 8  The second (Trust II) question is similar to the GSS-WVS question: "The majority of people in this community are basically honest and you can trust them." Respondents were considered to trust others if they were in agreement or strongly agreed with the statement. The third question (Trust III) is similar to the second one in its general phrasing, but actually asked about distrust: "Today you can't trust anybody." Those who did not agree with this statement were considered to trust others. Note that the latter two questions are more likely to suffer from the mis- identification problem highlighted by Glaeser et al. (1999) due to the general and ambiguous phrasing of the statements. Regarding the traditional questions on social participation, the main weakness of the GSS- WVS approach is that the questionnaire does not request information about the internal organization of the groups in which the respondent participates. Therefore, it is impossible to investigate how the internal organization and membership composition of social organizations affects the production of interpersonal trust. The Argentine survey improved on the GSS-WVS approach by including a series of detailed questions about the internal organization of the groups to which the respondent belongs. This is an improvement because individuals' decision to participate can be linked to the potential benefits (pecuniary or other) that can be derived from it. Control over management decisions, including fund management and leadership selection, may augment the capacity of individuals to derive social and economic benefits from their participation. Moreover, the composition of the membership of a group may affect the extent to which it has positive externalities on the rest of the community, as was argued by Durlauf (1999), Portes and Landolt (2000), Lederman et al. (2001), and several others. For this study, respondents were asked to identify the social 9  organizations to which they belonged, and later were asked several questions about the internal organization of the group. The questions about the internal organization of the groups covered the following issues: (1) Respondents were asked to characterize the process by which the organization or group makes decisions about fund management. If the respondent answered that "members debate and then decide" or if the respondent answered that "all members participate in the decision" then the organization was identified as having a "participatory fund management" decision process., (2) The process by which group leaders are selected was identified according to the following criteria: If the leadership selection process was by membership voting, volunteerism, spontaneous emergence of leaders, or simply without any leaders, then the respondent was identified as belonging to an organization with a "participatory leadership selection" process. (3) Respondents were also asked a set of questions about decision-making in general, not just in the management of funds. The same criteria used in (1) above were used to characterize organizations with "participatory decision-making." (4) The homogeneity of the membership of the group was identified through a series of questions that asked the respondent whether the membership is composed of people belonging to the same family, religion, gender, political beliefs, occupation, age group, education level, income level, province, nationality, and people having the same problems. If a respondent answered in the affirmative on at least 3 or 4 out of these 11 questions (hence two indicators were created), then the individual was characterized as participating in an organization with a "homogenous membership." 10  The following sub-sections show the participation rates by types of organization and trust rates. They also describe the geographic distribution of these rates across six Argentine geographic regions. B. The structure of social participation by organizational types Table 1 shows Argentina's participation rates by organizational types. The total participation rate is 19.7%. A small number of them said that they participate in at least two (2.2%) and an even smaller portion (0.2%) said that they participate in at least three. International studies use "membership density" as a measure of social capital, which is calculated as the average number of groups cited per respondent in each country. The data collected for this study implies a membership density of 0.21. This number is well below the corresponding average membership density in Argentina for 1981 and 1990 as estimated by the WVS, which was 0.41. In a sample of 37 developing and developed countries with WVS data, Argentina's membership density was the lowest. The fact that the number estimated with this new survey instrument is lower should be taken with a grain of salt due to differences in survey design.5 A recent study by FLACSO (1997) estimated Argentina's participation rate at 20%. Thus our current estimate seems reasonable. One point is clear: we have no evidence showing that Argentina currently is a country with a high level of social capital, and this new data on social participation is not encouraging. 5 In the GSS and WVS, the question on membership is: "Now we would like to know something about the groups or organizations to which individuals belong. Here is a list of various organizations. Could you tell me whether or not you are a member of each type?" In contrast, the Argentina survey asked the respondent to list the groups to which he/she belongs and then was asked to use a list of 30 types of organizations to describe each one. It is likely that providing a list of organizations before asking about actual participation would have increased the reported number of groups in which the respondent participates.  The rest of the analysis focuses on the primary organization identified by the respondents. The other participation rates shown in table 1 are subsets of the total, but they are overlapping subsets. The participation rate in homogenous organizations is 13.2 or 9.6%, depending on the number of criteria used to identify homogenous organizations. Argentina's participation rates in the other organizational types reach similar levels, around 13%, except for the case of participation in social organizations with participatory fund management, which has the lowest participation rate at less than 8%. Table 2 shows the corresponding participation rates across six geographic regions in Argentina. It is interesting to note that the Metropolitan region, composed of the Capital and surrounding settlements, has, by far, the lowest rates of participation. The highest overall rate of participation is in the Southern region, where over 26% of respondents participate. More remarkable is the fact that participation rates in organizations with participatory decision- making, including fund management, are quite high in this region. The rest of the regions have overall participation rates between 19 and 23%. There is an interesting pattern related to participation in organizations with homogenous membership: the ranking of the regions depends on the number of criteria used to identify an organization with a homogenous membership. For example, the Metropolitan region has the lowest rate of participation in this type of organization when we use 3 criteria, but it is not the lowest with 4 criteria. The Northeast has the lowest participation rate when using 4. Another example is the Northwest region, which has the second highest participation rate in homogenous organizations when using 3 criteria, but falls to third place when using 4. These differences across regions beg the question of what social and economic characteristics (if any) may be related to cross-regional differences in participation. Also, as will be discussed later, regional participation rates may impact individuals' interpersonal 12  trust, and thus it is interesting to ask whether marginal differences in participation rates have significant marginal effects on individuals' interpersonal trust. Some of these questions will be addressed in the econometric analysis presented below. C. The structure of trust by survey question Table 3 shows Argentina's "trust rates," which differ by the survey question used to identify individuals with interpersonal trust. The percentage of respondents that answered in the affirmative to the first, hypothetical trust question (Trust I) was 33.1%. The corresponding percentages derived from the more general trust questions (Trust II and III) are almost twice the first one, reaching 66.8 and 57.7%, respectively. Hence the question used produces dramatically different results. As will be seen later, there are also significant differences in terms of the predictions about individual social participation produced by these three different indicators of community trust. The regional trust rates show that the one derived from the hypothetical questions (Trust I) exhibits the lowest rates. The fourth region is the only exception, where the third type has a lower rate. According to Trust I, the highest rates of trust are found in the fourth region, followed by the sixth and second regions. Using Trust II, the highest rate is in the third region, followed by the first. The ranking of the regions is also different when using Trust III, which shows the fifth region in first place, followed by the third region. It is important to understand how these different "types" of trust affect social participation by individuals. Without this type of analysis, it is virtually impossible to make any sort of recommendation about how to measure interpersonal trust. Furthermore, in order to have an informed policy discussion about how trust 13  can be enhanced in Argentina, we need to know not only what is the desirable trust question, but also what are the determinants of an individual's decision to trust others. IV. An Economic Model of Social Capital Formation6 Before proceeding with the empirical analysis of the determinants of social capital in Argentina, it is important to establish some testable hypotheses. In this section we present a simple model of an individual's decision to invest time in accumulating social capital by participating in social organizations, based on expected costs and benefits. This approach is consistent with the sociological (Coleman 1990; I'ortes and Landolt 2000) and the economic literature (DiPasquale and Glaeser 1999) that emphasize the definitions of social capital linking the ability of individuals to secure resources through their membership in social networks. The decision to participate in social groups can be modeled as a dichotomous outcome. The individual decides whether or not to participate based on the expected net benefits: (1) D= 1 if nb(D) 2 0; D = 0 otherwise. "nb" stands for the net benefit. D is the decision to participate in social organizations; it equals one whenever participation in a social organization produces positive net benefits. In turn, these net benefits can be disaggregated into utility effects, where some are positive and some are negative as follows: 6 For alternative theoretical models of social capital formation see Glaeser et al. (2000) and Alesina and La Ferrara (1999). 14  (2) nb(D)= U(ASK(D)- we T(D)- 5e ASKe SK)