Social Capital, Union Bargaining Power and Economic Growth: The Role of Political Participation
This thesis investigates presumptive effects of the political participation on the economic growth through social capital accumulation. In the second section, by using an endogenous growth model, we examine the issue with a comparison of two economic systems; decentralized and centralized economy in the latter of which the representative household internalizes all externalities in social, productive and private sector, in contrast to the decentralized economy. In the third section, we approach the same point by adopting an efficient bargaining model in which we assume that average level of the political participation is a contributor to the labour union's bargaining strength. Upon this approach, we develop a comparative analysis by solving the representative household optimization problem in two different scenarios, with and without efficient wage hypothesis. We demonstrate that there exists an effect of the political participation resulting in a positive stationary growth rate in all models. Moreover, we found the average level of political participation to be correlated with the bargained wage rate and the bargained employment rate under the ef- ficient wage hypothesis.