The Institutional Trust as an Economic Resource: Incentives and Obstacles of Efficiency

Abstract

The study examines the transformation of the trust sphere in modern society. It is argued that in a long-term slowdown in global economic growth the more important is a non-economic progress measurement. The factors that were previously considered as non-economic and are resumed in concepts of social and human capital have a more intense impact on the economic development. In modern societies, an increasingly important factor of development is such a component of social capital as a generalized or institutional trust that reduces various transaction costs in social communications and empowers citizens opportunities associated with the use of social capital. Trust mechanisms are becoming increasingly impersonal and universal. However, the strategy of wide confidence is more unstable and fragile than a priori distrust for strangers legitimate for traditional culture. The early liberal market theory suggested that economically rational selfish individuals will voluntarily come to the need for self-restraint and confidence as a precondition of the successful building of civic associations and collective interaction strategies. At the same time the sizes of the state and its institutions were interpreted as a materialized distrust in society, reducing the overall efficiency of social transactions and additional costs. However, in a global reality of capitalism, that is characterized by growing rental arrangements, the role of the state as the institutional guarantor of generalized trust and the results of social interactions becomes increasingly important. Particularly significant is the function of the state as a value regulator within the context of the Russian peripheral market and the antimodern consensus. As a result, the hypotheses of the expansion of institutional trust, relevant in conditions of democracy and market economies, protecting the citizens in their expectations of social communications ends by diverse mechanisms of the welfare state, are of reduced axiological value in terms of peripheral capitalism with its’ rent-caste state, while the dominant pre-modern and antimodern social groups use limited "exclusive" trust strategy.

Keywords

• anti-modern consensus
• state
• trust
• Modernity
• confidence
• progress
• market
• social capital
• homo economicus