抄録
Economic inequality brings about corruption through deterioration of social capital.
In a society with large income gap, people are fragmented into small groups. Although they enjoy high level of trust among their group members, they neglect others who are not the members of their group. Thus people lose generalized trust which is trust toward the general public and commit wrongdoings such as cheating on taxes, accepting bribes, avoiding a fare on public transport and claiming government benefits to which they are not entitled. Inequality deteriorates generalized trust. That in turn encourages people to commit wrong doings. Eric Uslaner named this process an inequality trap because it is often accompanied with corruption on the part of the government. This paper deals with the validity of Uslaner’s inequality trap hypotheses based on the mail survey data the author carried out in Japan.
Although I cannot say that inequality trap exists in Japan, I found many evidences that connect the elements of social capital with tolerance toward corruption.
