Social capital and health across European countries

Abstract

In this article we compare the effect of trust and civic participation on self-assessed health across 10 European countries. We find that, after controlling for a rich set of socio-economic characteristics, for actual health status and for health-related behaviours, trust has a significantly positive effect on perceived health in Sweden and Germany, but none in the other countries. Civic participation does have a positive and quite similar effect in all countries. Our conclusion is that they measure two different aspects of social capital that must be treated separately.

Acknowledgements

SHARE data collection in 2004–2007 was primarily funded by the European Commission through its fifth and sixth framework programmes (project numbers QLK6-CT-2001-00360; RII-CT-2006-062193; CIT5-CT-2005-028857). Additional funding by the US National Institute on Aging (grant numbers U01 AG09740-13S2; P01 AG005842; P01 AG08291; P30 AG12815; Y1-AG-4553-01; OGHA 04-064; R21 AG025169) as well as by various national sources is gratefully acknowledged (see http://www.share-project.org for a full list of funding institutions).

Notes

¹Preamble to the Constitution of the World Health Organization as adopted by the International Health Conference, New York, 19 June–22 July 1946; signed on 22 July 1946 by the representatives of 61 States (Official Records of the World Health Organization, No. 2, p. 100) and entered into force on 7 April 1948. The definition has not been amended since 1948.

²This article uses data from SHARE Wave 1, as of December 2008.

³WVS, EVS and Zentral Archive are the data archives and distributors of the WVS/EVS data. See European Values Study Group and World Values Survey Association (2006) for a detailed description of the data.

⁴In the analysis we used lsumact, which is the hyperbolic-sine log transformation of sumact (Burbridge et al., 1988).

⁵Each regression includes on the right-hand side also gender, age, employment status, education, income, wealth and health-related behaviour (smoking, drinking too much alcohol and regularly exercising); their coefficients have the expected signs. Due to the presence of many observations with missing values for Greece on variables of interest, we did not include this country in the analysis. We estimated the same set of regressions with ordered probit: results are qualitatively similar to the reported OLS results. The full set of results is reported in van Groezen et al. (2009).