Trust

Trust is a fundamental element of social capital — essential for the cohesion of communities, vital for effective cooperation, and crucial for economic development.

On this page we present data on trust and examine the distribution and reliability of available measures. We also explore the research that studies the link between trust and economic development.

One of the most widely used tools to measure trust attitudes across the world comes from the World Values Survey – an international research project that has been conducting standardized nationally-representative social surveys enquiring about political, socioeconomic, and cultural values of people around the world for decades.

The World Values Survey (WVS) asks many different questions about trust. Their most general question asks: “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you need to be very careful in dealing with people?" Possible answers include "Most people can be trusted", "Do not know", and "Need to be very careful".

The differences between countries that we can see in this map are very large. In Norway and Sweden for example, more than 60% of the survey respondents think that most people can be trusted. At the other end of the spectrum, in Colombia, Brazil and Peru less than 10% think that this is the case.

In his 1972 article “Gifts and Exchanges,” Kenneth Arrow, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in the same year, observed that “virtually every commercial transaction has within itself an element of trust, certainly any transaction conducted over a period of time.” 1

Most of us have likely experienced this in our own lives — it’s challenging to engage in dealings where trust in the other party is lacking.

The following chart shows the relationship between GDP per capita and trust, as measured by the World Values Survey. There is a strong positive relationship: countries with higher self-reported trust attitudes are also countries with higher economic activity.

When digging deeper into this connection using more detailed data and economic analysis, researchers have found evidence of a causal relationship, suggesting that trust does indeed drive economic growth and not just correlate with it. 2

Low trust levels can increase transaction costs, which can have significant economic efficiency costs. Additionally, low trust levels can discourage people from investing in public goods and infrastructure (e.g. by voting for different politicians, or evading taxes), as they do not trust that their money will be utilized effectively. 4

Data comparing trust levels between countries, and even data on differences within countries, shows that more economic inequality tends to go together with lower levels of trust. 5

The next visualization supports this idea: it’s a scatter plot comparing trust estimates from the World Values Survey against income inequality measured by the Gini index.

Each dot on this scatter-plot corresponds to a different country, with colors representing different world regions and dot sizes representing the size of the population. A Gini index of 0 would represent perfect equality, so the observed negative correlation in this graph shows that higher inequality is associated with lower trust.

This link between more inequality and less trust can be explained by the fact that people are often more willing to trust those who are similar to themselves; or because higher inequality may lead to conflicts over resources. 6

The following scatter plot compares cross-country estimates of trust, using data from two different surveys for each country. By comparing the estimates from different surveys, we can check if similar but different measurement methods provide a consistent and robust picture of interpersonal trust.