No. 1017 - A note on social capital, space and growth in Europe

This note replicates the analysis of Tabellini (2010) on the relationship between social capital and regional economic growth in Europe, extending that work and the underlying dataset by focusing on the spatial dimension of social capital and introducing a definition of contiguity among European regions. We find a sizable and robust contribution of social capital to regional growth. We also estimate a Spatial autoregressive model with autoregressive disturbances (SARAR) and a Spatial Durbin Error model (SDEM). The results confirm the positive role of social capital, highlighting the importance of spatial spillovers, which warrants further discussion.

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