Social Capital And The Inequality Of Peasants'incomes

As a branch of social science, the methodology of economics is mainly based on individualism, which caused the "under-socialized conception of man"; on the contrast, the methodology of sociobgy is mainly based on collectivism, which caused the "over-socialized conception of man". How to build the social structure influencing economic activities into economic models, making the economic analysis closer to social reality, is one of frontiers in economics recently.As for the research of peasant's incomes, they focus on the perspective of physical capital, education, institutions, etc. When realizing that social interactions of man also influence its economic performance, the concept of social capital, which was created in the1980s, would be another factor affecting the inequality of peasants' incomes. This paper, which uses the Chinese Household Income Survey, conducted in2002by the Chinese Academy of Social Science, explored the relationship of social capital, including social network, trust and harmony, and the inequality of peasants' incomes.This paper mainly contains two parts. First, beginning with the relationship history of economics and sociology, it introduces the rise and basic meaning of social economics. Social economics represents the trends of dialogue from departure between economics and sociology, which is helpful for both disciplines. Social capital could be seen as an outcome of this trend, which tries to build some important social interaction factors into mainstream economic models. The factors contain social network, trust and social norms. Although the concept of social capital has some vagueness, the three aspects characterize the basic context.Then, following the previous theoretical and empirical research on social capital, this paper explicitly explores the relationships of social capital and inequality of peasants'incomes. It found that:1. Social capital, including social network, trust and harmony, has a significant positive influence of peasants'incomes. For example of social network, the10percentage increase of proportion of gift expenditure could increase the income per head by2.25%. A standard deviation increase of having a relative living in the county seat could increase by4.1%, while as cropping land could increase by1.7%, and average education level by8.3%.2. Different kinds of social capital have different influence in regions with different economic development levels. Social network is more important in mid-western regions with relatively lower level of marketization, while trust means more values in eastern regions with higher level of marketization.3. It amends the hypothesis of Stiglitz (2000). On the one hand, it proved that some social capital (social network) become less important with the increase of marketization; on the other hand, other kinds of social capital (trust) are more crucial in the future economic development.