QUANTIFY TRUST IN THE EUROPEAN COUNTRIES

The concept of social capital may be approached from a variety of disciplines such as sociology, political science, economics, etc. Definitions of social capital use terms like networks, trust and shared action. The object of this work is to move towards a quantification of social capital and, more specifically, in finding a suitable proxy variable, because measuring social capital is difficult since there are no tangible elements that might aid identification in order to carry out an exact measurement. This study focuses on just one of the recurrent features of these definitions, ?Trust?. In order to do this, a principal components analysis (PCA?s) is carried out to clarify the relationships that exist between the different measures of this variable.