The Research On Financial Development From The Perspective Of The Poor's Social Capital

Under the background of new era, relative poverty has become the core issue of China's poverty. Meanwhile, the low property income of poor family caused by financial development lag has become one of the major bottleneck which affects the performance of our country's anti-poverty policy. Undoubtedly, it is of realistic significance to improve the poor's financial situation in reversing income gap, reducing relative poverty and then promoting China's economic development, social harmony and stability.Besides the perspectives of physical capital and human capital, social capital is attracting more and more scholars' attention in poverty research area. Since lacking of social capital is the main reason that causes poverty, it will be effective for anti-poverty by fostering the poor's social capital as to improve their own condition.This paper analyses the effects of social capital in improving the poor's financial situation and then easing poverty respectively from the household financial assets and liabilities aspects. In order to indicate the importance of social capital in improving poor families'financial condition, the author researches the holding of financial assets, commercial credit and folk lending about social capital which made up of structured and cognitive social capital with the actual investigation.Using factor analysis and regression methodology, the results indicate that both structured social capital and cognitive social capital have significant positive effect on poor families'financial assets holding, cognitive social capital's effect is stronger than structured social capital's. Moreover, the results indicate that structured social capital has a significant positive effect on poor families' commercial credit while cognitive social capital doesn't have, and cognitive social capital has a significant positive effect on poor families'folk lending while structured social capital doesn't have. Innovation, limitation and implications for research and practice are discussed.P. S:this paper is sponsored by The National Social Science Fund Project " Macroeconomic Measure of Social Capital and Its Application"(Authorized number:08XTJ003) and The National Natural Science Fund Project"Theoretical and Empirical Study on Effect Management of Government's Anti-poverty Policy from Social Capital Perspective"(Authorized number:70873097), which are chaired by professor Nie Fuqiang and professor Wang Chaoming.