Among the social determinants of health, social capital is gaining increasing attention in health economics and health policy. Although the boundaries of the concept of social capital are still under debate, the essence of social capital is that of favoring and supporting cooperation within communities, allowing them to supply a range of services which are beneficial to individual health. This chapter, after a brief overview of the debate about the conceptualization of social capital, discusses in some detail the mechanisms which relate social capital to health and offers a review of the recent empirical literature, focusing, although not exclusively, on developing countries. In the second part, this chapter contributes to the empirical literature by estimating the association between individual social capital and health in a cross-country setting including 93 countries, the largest ever used in this literature. Results confirm the beneficial role that social capital has in individual health and unveil a pattern so far rather overlooked, that the influence of social capital seems to be stronger in developed than developing countries. The third part of the chapter focuses on policy interventions and recommendations. It provides a broad taxonomy of policies, motivated by theoretical models of investment in social capital. Next, it discusses a number of academic papers describing and evaluating interventions aimed at creating social capital, and concludes by describing a few interventions realized by two organizations whose purpose is to help communities accumulate social capital.
