Financialization, religion, and social trust in rural China

Wei Yin; Berna Kirkulak-Uludag; Kent Matthews

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0240114

Financialization, religion, and social trust in rural China

PLoS One. 2020 Oct 12;15(10):e0240114. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0240114. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Wei Yin¹, Berna Kirkulak-Uludag², Kent Matthews^{3

4

5}

Affiliations

¹ School of Economics and Management, Southeast University, Nanjing, China.
² Faculty of Business, Dokuz Eylul University, İzmir, Turkey.
³ Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, Cardiff, United Kingdom.
⁴ Nottingham University Business School Ningbo, Ningbo, China.
⁵ School of Public Finance & Taxation, Zhongnan University of Economics & Law, Wuhan, China.

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of financial development and religion on social trust in rural China. We use multinomial logistic regression models with the Chinese Household Income Project (CHIP) Survey Data of 2013. The findings show that while financial development has a negative and significant impact on particular trust but no impact on general trust, religion has a positive relationship with general trust but insignificant relationship with particular trust. This study further investigates the impact of interaction between financial development and religion on social trust. The joint effect of financial development and religion has significant and positive relationship with particular trust. This implies that while financialization destroys the traditional relatives and friends trust based on lending and borrowing in rural area, religiosity lessens the negative impact of financialization on particular trust.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

China
Humans
Logistic Models
Religion*
Rural Population
Social Planning*
Socioeconomic Factors
Surveys and Questionnaires
Trust*

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71503041), Social Science Fund Program of Jiangsu Province of China (17EYC004), and Zhishan Youth Scholar Program Of SEU (2242019R40039), received by Wei Yin, https://www.seu.edu.cn/english/. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.