A Synthetic Indicator to Measure Social Capital in the Different Italian Regions: A Before and After Comparison of the Economic Crisis

The distribution of social capital across the different Italian regions has been the subject of academic interest in Italy for many years. In the wake of the pioneering work by Robert Putnam (1993), researchers have identified various patterns of social capital using different approaches and indicators. Social capital can be considered a "set of social relations" that provide access to different types of resources, and these social relations can be informal and/or formal. Using the distance method approach as applied by Pena (2009), two synthetic indicators were created to measure the social capital of the different Italian regions: one using data collected during the year 2003; and a second using data pertaining to the year 2013. The data sources were the "Aspects of daily life" surveys and the units of analysis were the 20 Italian regions. These two synthetic indicators permit the distribution of social capital before and after the 2008 global financial crisis to be compared, to rank the Italian regions and to evaluate the impact of each individual indicator on the synthetic indicator. The main findings can be summarized as follows: the synthetic indicators confirm the disparity in social capital between the north and the south of Italy; some northern regions with high levels of social capital prior to 2008 had lost their social capital endowment in the second time period considered; and the simple indicators used to calculate the synthetic indicator of social capital have a differential affect upon the latter. The results of this study forecast that the gap in social capital between northern and southern Italy will increase; the development of additional initiatives for monitoring and measuring social capital are therefore required.