社会资本在减轻农村贫困中的作用：文献述评与研究展望

Roles of Social Capital to Alleviate Poverty:A Literature Review

近年来,社会资本在减轻农村贫困中的作用逐渐成为发展经济学家关注的一个热点。本文分别从静态和动态两个视角综述了相关研究的思路和方法:从静态视角来看,信任对于减少绝对贫困有积极的作用,但某些形式的社会资本难以减轻绝对贫困,关于社会资本是否能减轻相对贫困则尚未取得一致的认识;从动态视角来看,社会资本通过非正式保险的机制平滑消费、减轻暂时贫困,通过促进融资和创业、保护产权、促进公共品提供和劳动力流动,有助于消除长期贫困。总的来看,随着市场化进程的深入,社会资本反贫困的积极作用有减弱的趋势。本文基于理论评述,提出了深化社会资本的减贫理论机制(尤其是对相对贫困的作用机制)、市场化进程中的社会资本反贫困机制、改进社会资本测量、加强因果效应识别等未来的研究方向。

The studies on social capital receive an increasing attention from development economists in recent years. This paper reviews the thinking and methods of relevant literature from static and dynamic perspectives and finds that： Statically, trust plays a positive role in alleviate absolute poverty although some other types of social capital can not work, and there is much divergence of it effects on the relative poverty; Dynamically, social networks can smooth consumption and alleviate transient poverty as a informal insurance system, and social networks including lineage networks are helpful to eliminate chronic poverty by means of promoting financing, entrepreneurship, public goods and labor mobility. However, the positive role to alleviate poverties seems to get weaker with the progressing of market power. We therefore suggest some further research directions as modeling mechanism of alleviating poverty （especially relative poverty）, anti -poverty mechanism under marketization, improvement of measurement and dealing with endogeneity to identify its causal effects.