The Environmental Kuznets Curve Under a New framework: Role of Social Capital in Water Pollution

framework. Some researchers have incorporated other variables along with per capita
income to investigate economic-environmental analysis (Bhattarai and Hammig;
Dasgupta et al). For example, Dasgupta et al. used measures of governance, geographic
vulnerability, and the pollution-intensity of industrial activity along with per capita
income to estimate EKC. The results suggest the importance of governance and
geographic vulnerability in EKC analysis.

We incorporate “social capital” into a traditional framework EKC to explore
whether social capital enhances our understanding of the pollution-income relationship.
We demonstrate the case using highly disaggregated water pollution data available from
Louisiana watersheds.

Social Capital

In the past two decades “social capital” has become an influential concept within
sociology and the social sciences. From sociologists point of view, cultural, economic,
functional, linguistic, personal, political, symbolic, and social capital are different kind of
existence capital. Although social capital has been noted in economics text decades ago,
there have been a lot of arguments about its nature and existence for many decades (Falk
and Kilpatrick).

Putnam defines “social capital” as: “features of social life - networks, norms, and
trust - that enable participants to act together more effectively to pursue shared
objectives.” There is a direct relation between trust and connection among people so that
increase in connection among people increase the trust among them and vice versa. This
states that we can expect a positive strong correlation between civic engagements and

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