Trust In Institutions

this graph was created in PowerBi,Tableau and OurDataWorld:

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 map below shows the share of respondents who answered “most people can be trusted” to this question.

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.

The question of trust and its importance for economic development has attracted the attention of economists for decades.

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