School of Public Administration, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, China; Collaborative Innovation Center for Social Governance of Hubei Province, China.
College of Business and Law, University of Canterbury, New Zealand.
J Health Econ. 2020 Jul;72:102317. doi: 10.1016/j.jhealeco.2020.102317. Epub 2020 Jun 1.
The relationship between social capital and health has received extensive attention in fields such as public health, medicine, epidemiology, gerontology and other health-related disciplines. In contrast, the economics literature on this subject is relatively small. To address this research gap, we investigate the cross-disciplinary empirical literature using meta-analysis. We analyze 12,778 estimates from 470 studies. Our analysis finds that social capital is significantly related to a variety of positive health outcomes. However, the effect sizes are consistently very small. This finding is robust across different types of social capital (e.g., cognitive, structural, bonding, bridging, linking), and for many different measures of health outcomes (e.g., mortality, disease/illnesses, depression). The small effects that we estimate cast doubt on recent initiatives to promote health through social capital such as those by the WHO, the OECD, and US Healthy People 2020.
社会资本与健康之间的关系在公共卫生、医学、流行病学、老年学和其他与健康相关的学科领域受到了广泛关注。相比之下，经济学领域关于这个主题的文献相对较少。为了解决这一研究差距，我们使用元分析方法调查了跨学科的实证文献。我们分析了 470 项研究中的 12778 个估计值。我们的分析发现，社会资本与各种积极的健康结果显著相关。然而，效应大小始终非常小。这一发现对于不同类型的社会资本（如认知、结构、黏合、桥接、连接）以及许多不同的健康结果衡量指标（如死亡率、疾病/疾病、抑郁）都是稳健的。我们估计的小效应对最近通过社会资本促进健康的举措提出了质疑，例如世界卫生组织、经合组织和美国健康人 2020 年的举措。
