Social capital has played an increasingly important role in regional development,as the necessary prerequisite to improve environment, it has attracted increasing interests. Now, we should clarify the relationship between social capital and environmental impact in order to find out countermeasures to solve the complex environmental problems. In the paper, the ecological footprint was taken as the index of the environmental impact, social capital was measured by social net, general trust, institution trust and norm, based on investigation data of 20 villages in Gansu Province, using the econometric model to analyze the village-level relationship between social capital and environmental impact. The results indicate: 1)Social capital diversity can help explain the cross-village environmental impact diversity, after introducing the social capital index, the model’s goodness of fit (R2) increased by 0.007-0.09. 2) Both the relationship between the general trust and environmental impact and that between the institutional trust and environmental impact are positively correlated significantly, with regression coefficient being 0.995 and 0.719, respectively. That is to say, although improving the general trust and the institutional trust will enhance the environmental impact, yet the change speed of the environmental impact caused by them is inferior to that of themselves. 3) The relationship between the norm dimension and environmental impact is negatively correlated significantly, the regression coefficient is-0.463. In other words, improving the norm will slow down the environmental impact, but the reducing speed of the environmental impact caused by it is inferior to that of itself. The relationship between the social net dimension and environmental impact shows a positive correlation, but it is insignificant in the model. 4) Increasing the rural labour’ educational attainment and enhancing the non-agriculture employment level will slow down the environmental impact. The relationship between population quantity and environmental impact is a positive correlation, but it is insignificant in many models. Finally, it points out the further concerned problems in the research of the function of social capital on environmental impact.
Key words
village /
social capital /
ecological footprint /
Gansu Province
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