Is social capital green? Cultural features and environmental performance in the European Union

This paper analyses the relationship between social capital and environmental performance in the European Union. In a first stage, environmental performance is measured by an index of eco-efficiency at the country level, computed using data envelopment analysis techniques and data for the year 2013. In a second stage, the influence of social capital and other relevant control variables on eco-efficiency is assessed by means of truncated regressions and bootstrapping, as proposed by Simar and Wilson (J Econom 136(1):31-64, 2007). For several model specifications, tests fail to reject the hypothesis of no effect of social capital on environmental performance, and the main driver of environmental performance is found to be the level of economic development, measured by GDP per capita. Furthermore, this result is robust to different definitions of social capital and sample periods.