Social Capital and Human Well-Being: A Southeast Asian Country Perspective

Abstract

Developing countries in Southeast Asia have suffered from growth without development for a long time. This paper aims to address the contingent nature of public policy on community development. We insist that the effects of public policy depend upon several factors - particularly the various characteristics of the local community. State and market mechanism often fails to improve human well-being in most developing countries. In this paper, we support the role of community, and discuss why community outperforms state and market in the context of Southeast Asian countries. We argue that social capital is a basic need of community development, and a condition stimulating development policy to work properly. The development policy could not work effectively in the community that holds bad attributes of social structure. We apply the concept of embeddedness to discuss the benefits of social ties – how they can be counted as social capital, how the social capital influences development policy and contributes to well-being of the community. In addition, we apply niche theory to delineate how a community can improve itself by building up social capital, based on its own roots and cultural legacy, that helps identify an appropriate niche which can be exploited.
 



Author Information
Ekkarat Chainamkem, University of Antwerp, Belgium

Paper Information
Conference: ACAS2013
Stream: Asian Studies

This paper is part of the ACAS2013 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
Chainamkem E. (2013) Social Capital and Human Well-Being: A Southeast Asian Country Perspective ISSN: 2187-4735 – The Asian Conference on Asian Studies 2013 – Official Conference Proceedings https://doi.org/10.22492/2187-4735.20130025
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/2187-4735.20130025


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Posted by James Alexander Gordon