AN EMPIRICAL APPROACH TO TRUST AND GROWTH IN THE EUROPEAN COUNTRIES

Trust problems due to the international financial crisis originated by the "subprime" mortgages, raised the importance of a subject that became common to the economic growth models, since the end of the XX century. This work presents an approach to the concept of "trust" and its implications to the economic growth. In order to accomplish this goal it is developed a principal components analysis in order to reduce the dimensions of the variable and thus incorporate it in a growth model through a "proxy" variable. The analysis uses 13 EU countries with available data since 1980 to 1999, proposing a growth model that allows the analysis of the human capital and social capital effect in the european economies under analysis.