Territorial dynamic and welness

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In a previos work (Abbafati, van Gameren and Soloaga, 2013) we made an assessment of the causal relationship between social capital and individual health in Mexico. Mexico is an interesting case study since it has the second highest income inequality among working-age people in the OECD, and the second highest level of corruption, a widespread informal economy, while access to health services has only recently begun to have the pretention of universal coverage. This setting is propitious for the appearance of either small or wide networks and relationships that through mutual trust and reciprocity fills the absence of a complete social security system. Relationships between social capital and health may therefore be different from what has been found in the US, Europe and Argentina. For this research we used cross section data from the first wave of the Mexican Family Life Survey (MxFLS-2002), with a nationally representative sample of 8.440 households from 150 villages in the country. We estimated the causal effect of individual-level social capital on self-assessed health, measured as a binary variable, using measures of formal and informal social interactions as indicators of social capital. In particular, we constructed measures for trust (crime and victimization), participation in the community, social isolation (loneliness), caregiving activities, and access to informal credits. We accounted for the potential endogeneity of social capital through instrumental variable techniques, but found that our social capital indicators can be considered exogenous. Results suggested that the macro indicators (trust, participation, absence of social isolation) have a positive effect on health, but that the impact of micro indicators (caregiving, informal credits) is negligible. Although the paper provided the first attemp in analyzing the causal relationship between social capital and individual health in Mexico, the use of cross sectional data limited the credibility of the results, mostly because of the potencial endogeneity of key variables in the analysis. During June 2015, at la Sapienza, we revisited the paper and made the first steps in preparing a new data set constructed using the panel data structure of the MxFLS, with data available for 2005 and 2009. A lot of effort was devoted to make sure that each identification number for the household in one year does correspond to the same household in the two additional years. This is a common problem for users of the MxFLS but a key feature for the data panel approach we are seeking for the new version of the paper. We made further progress in constructing the social capital as well as the control variables for years 2005 and 2009. After a final work on data cleaning we will be ready to re-run regressions from the first paper but with a data panel approach. We expect to have ready the new results by September 2015 and the new complete version of the paper by November/December 2015.