Social Capital and health in Mexico: a probit estimation

This paper is the first assessment of the causal relationship between social capital and individual health in Mexico. Mexico 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. We use 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 estimate the causal effect of individual-level social capital on selfassessed health, measured as a binary variabl