Abstract:
Social capital is defined as the tangible and intangible relationship among people in a society which bases on trust, standard, value and culture. Formal or informal cooperation between people in forms of institute organization or network can be also classified as social capital. This thesis focused on various types of social capital at provincial level of Thailand and analyzed their effects on provincial development. Our results confirm the fact that some types of social capital namely peoples community participation contributes on poverty reduction. In addition, some types of social capital for example political participation or peoples community participation contributes positively on gross provincial product per capitas expansion. Unfortunately, the latters effect is not statistically significant. In contrast, labor union or safety in life and properties at provincial level do not contribute on poverty reduction or provincial economic development. However, in Thai society at the present time, there is newly established social capital in the form of community organization throughout the country. We confirm the fact that low economic development stimulates the formation of Olson type social capital in a province. Other economic factors like poor government redistributive policy and high dependency ratio stimulate the establishment of Olson type social capital. This study implies that the past unbalanced economic development is a factor which forms social capital