Social capital: Evaluating its roles in competitiveness and ensuring human development

This contribution identifies the features of social capital (SC) development and its relationship with competitiveness based on a two-tier analysis: (1) the relationship of SC with key indicators of competitiveness and human development at the macroeconomic level; (2) the impact of social capital components on financial and non-financial indicators of enterprise competitiveness. The peculiarities of social capital development are revealed using the statistical data of 171 countries, in particular, the value of the social capital sub-index as a constituent of the global sustainability competitiveness index from 2014 to 2020. The differences in social capital development are determined via a cluster analysis performed by means of the software STATISTICA 10.0. As a result, it was uncovered that world countries are highly heterogeneous at the level of social capital development, and the differences, which narrowed slightly in 2017-2019, showed an increase again in 2020. The identified cluster countries, where SC development is the highest, are also among the leaders in terms of competitiveness and human development. Regarding the impact of social capital on competitiveness growth at an enterprise, we found out that it is influenced mainly by the development of relational and cognitive social capital. These findings were obtained as a result of our own survey conducted on a representative sample of enterprise owners and managerial staff in December 2020 - March 2021.