• Home
  1. Home
  2. A dark side of social capital? kinship, consumption, and savings
Scientific article
English

A dark side of social capital? kinship, consumption, and savings

Contributors

Di Falco, Salvatore; Bulte, Erwin

Published in

Journal of development studies, vol. 47, no. 8, p. 1128-1151

Publication date

2011

Abstract

We explore whether traditional sharing norms in kinship networks affect consumption and accumulation decisions of poor black households in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Using a proxy for the number of family dependents, our results are consistent with the interpretation that households try to evade their ‘sharing obligations' by (i) accumulating durables that are non-sharable at the expense of durables that may be shared and (ii) reducing savings in liquid assets. By attenuating accumulation incentives, kinship sharing may come at the expense of income growth – if so, a culturally-induced poverty trap can possibly eventuate. We demonstrate tentative evidence that more extensive kinship networks are associated with lower incomes.

UNIGE affiliation entities

Citation (ISO format)

DI FALCO, Salvatore, BULTE, Erwin. A dark side of social capital? kinship, consumption, and savings. In: Journal of development studies, 2011, vol. 47, n° 8, p. 1128–1151. doi: 10.1080/00220388.2010.514328

Main files (1)

Article (Published version)

Identifiers

Journal ISSN

0022-0388
539views
3downloads

Technical informations

Creation

27/11/2014 19:18:00

First validation

27/11/2014 19:18:00

Update

14/03/2023 22:19:51

Status update

14/03/2023 22:19:51

Last indexation

30/10/2024 21:00:15
All rights reserved by Archive ouverte UNIGE and the University of Geneva
OpenAIRE Indexed & Validated