Commentary

In this session there are five papers which cover a wide range of issues and evidence which bear on the general theme of social capital. As we have learned in the conference ’ the concept of social capital is an extraordinarily rich one, but also one that appears to be subject to multiple interpretations. Whether the concept is useful for classification and measurement or not ultimately depends upon how it is used. The papers in this session demonstrate both the weaknesses and strengths of the concept of social capital. Many people associate the term with the original Putnam notions of trust and association. This leads to a certain restriction in the way the concept is both used and measured. For most of the papers in this session, however, a somewhat broader interpretation is used. For economists there is a distinct blurring between the concept of social capital and other concepts such as human capital, neighbourhood effects, or simply education. My general impression is that empirical work in the area will probably be advanced by the use of more restrictive definitions of social capital. Nevertheless, the papers of this session all bear in one way or another upon social capital and its role in economic growth and development. The McMahon paper is most closely related to the traditional concept of human capital. The paper presents an estimated dynamic model of the interactions between education, economic growth, and a number of social outcome variables such as inequality, environmental quality, and political stability. The model is estimated using a panel of OECD countries. The economic module is distinguished by the presence of an educational externality in an otherwise traditional Lucas style growth model. The non-economic outcomes variables come from a variety of reduced form equations which have substantial empirical plausibility. What I found most interesting about the paper was the incredible lags, often on the order of 25 years, between