Reflections on social capital and economic performance

In the last 20 years, the concept of social capital has attracted much more attention and many more devotees than any other concept in the social sciences. This has gradually resulted in an enormous amount of literature. This paper seeks to make a threefold contribution to the voluminous literature on social capital. First, it argues against the recent interest in the foundations of social capital, that the real foundations of social capital cannot be found and thus should not be sought in the writings of the putative forerunners of the concept, as some authors have suggested (e.g. Putnam 2000, Ostrom and Ahn 2003). Second, it argues against the objections to the non-capital properties of social capital that social capital is an important form of capital. Finally, this paper suggests that social capital is not the only missing link in reaching higher levels of economic performance. There are also other important factors that can equally be considered as potential missing links.