Social trust has been identified as a catalyst for reforms. We take the literature further in two ways. First, we make … a fine-grained analysis of mechanisms through which social trust enables liberalizing reforms - by strengthening the … areas from reforms that decrease it. We study separately how social trust, interacted with the different types of political …

We conduct an extensive robustness analysis of the relationship between trust and growth by investigating a later time …. We find that when outliers (especially China) are removed, the trust-growth relationship is no longer robust. On average …, the trust coefficient is half as large as in previous findings …

We present new evidence on how generalized trust is formed. Unlike previous studies, we look at the explanatory power … the Economic Freedom Index) increase trust. The idea is that a market economy, building on voluntary transactions and … mechanisms for trust to emerge between people …