Social capital and health across European countries

Abstract

We compare the effect of trust and civic participation on self-assessed health across ten 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 in 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.