In the World Bank’s last Doing Business survey, the 2020 edition published in late 2019, enforcing a commercial contract through the courts took 485 days in Denmark, measured in Copenhagen, and 801 days in Brazil, a weighted average of its two biggest business cities, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Both countries have functioning legal systems, commercial courts, and constitutional protections for property rights. The formal institutional infrastructure is, for these purposes, roughly comparable, but the outcomes are far apart.
Those 316 days measure how long a court takes to settle a dispute and enforce the result. Court resources and procedure account for some of the difference, and part of the gap plausibly reflects substitution: the additional formal machinery that has to run when the informal expectation of honest dealing is thin. Every step that trust would have made unnecessary adds time and cost: the verification, the due diligence, the escalation to counsel before a contract is signed, the insurance against counterparty default. Most of those steps never show up in the court figures at all. Where trust is thin, the court ends up doing work that the expectation of honest dealing would otherwise do for free.
The court figures describe a standard commercial case once it has been filed. They say nothing about what happens upstream: the risk premiums baked into every transaction in a low-trust environment, the compliance infrastructure that exists to verify what professional norms would once have governed, the layers of contractual protection that businesses in high-trust economies never need. Those costs appear nowhere as a “trust surcharge,” and their absence from Denmark’s figures doesn’t mean someone counted them and found them small. Where honest dealing can be assumed, many of them are simply never incurred.
We have built precise instruments for measuring the formal overhead of commercial life, and only rough, rarely consulted gauges for the thing that determines whether that overhead is necessary, and that thing is running down.
What economists left off the balance sheet
The idea that trust is economically significant isn’t novel. Kenneth Arrow stated it plainly in 1972: “Virtually every commercial transaction has within itself an element of trust.” Arrow’s point was about market function: buyers and sellers, unable to verify everything, still transact millions of times daily without paralysis or litigation, because they extend trust. That extension is cheap, and the alternative is not.
Oliver Williamson spent two decades working out the economic logic of that alternative. Transaction cost economics, developed through the 1970s and 1980s, showed that governance structures, contract design, and vertical integration decisions are responses to the risk of opportunism: the danger that a trading partner will exploit the gaps in a contract. Where that risk is low, simple market contracts work. Where it’s high, firms invest in monitoring, verification, and formal enforcement, or bring the activity in-house, all of which add overhead. Williamson himself avoided the word “trust”, but opportunism is its mirror image.
What neither Arrow nor Williamson could easily do was aggregate. Individual transactions may or may not carry a trust premium, but for decades there was no clean way to measure it at the level of a national economy, or to compare Denmark and Brazil on the totality of trust-related friction beyond contract enforcement days. So macroeconomic growth models, built on capital accumulation, labour supply, technological change and institutional quality, largely treated the level of trust beneath all those inputs as a fixed given, even though it shifts.
The empirical breakthrough came in 1997, when Stephen Knack and Philip Keefer compared survey measures of trust across 29 market economies and found that average trust levels correlate strongly with GDP per capita and investment rates. A ten percentage point increase in trust was associated with a growth increase of four-fifths of a percentage point, and in growth economics fractions of a percentage point add up to large differences over decades. What mattered was generalised trust: whether respondents believed that most people could be trusted, meaning people outside their network, people they didn’t know.
Francis Fukuyama drew the organisational implication. High-trust societies such as Germany and Japan could build large, professionally managed enterprises because the cooperation problem was solved informally. Low-trust societies ended up constrained to smaller, family-based structures, because formal verification was too expensive to scale. The argument concerns what kinds of productive organisation are possible under different social conditions, rather than what any culture is destined to achieve.
Robert Putnam’s contribution, first in an essay and then in a book, was to argue that generalised trust grows out of dense networks of civic association and, in the book, to popularise a distinction that policy conversations largely ignore, between bonding and bridging social capital.
The academic literature has had the mechanism for thirty years, and the empirical support was solid by 1997. And yet trust remains at the margins of economic policy. Statisticians know how to measure it: the OECD published guidelines for doing so in 2017, and New Zealand’s Treasury counts social cohesion as part of national wealth. But mainstream growth forecasts do not treat it as a variable to be managed. The thing that determines whether all the formal infrastructure of commerce functions efficiently sits, in practice, off the balance sheet.
The measurement problem
The World Values Survey "most people can be trusted" question has attracted two distinct methodological challenges. The first is whether the survey answer correlates with experimentally measured trust, in trust games where people make real decisions about entrusting money to strangers. It does, which gives the measure reasonable external validity. The second is a different problem: when respondents are asked about "most people," a significant proportion answer partly about people they know personally rather than strangers in general, which blurs what the question captures. Neither critique destroys the measure, and re-testing found Zak and Knack's trust–growth results highly robust, though the original Knack and Keefer estimates proved more sensitive to which countries are in the sample. Both are reasons to treat point estimates with care. What survives scrutiny is the directional finding: across multiple measurement approaches, higher generalised trust correlates with better economic performance.Decline, divergence and chronic deficit
The trust decline is not one story. Three different configurations of trust failure are playing out across the countries most frequently cited together, and treating them as parallel cases obscures more than it reveals. The economic damage looks different in each, and so does the way out, if there is one.
The United States is the long decline case. In 1972, 46% of Americans answered that “most people can be trusted”, falling to 34% by 2018, and since then the figure has largely levelled off at that lower level rather than recovered. A second long-running survey points the same way: about half of Americans said most people could be trusted around 1990, against 37% in 2017. Putnam’s figures reach further back, from 58% in 1960 to 37% by 1993, long before Facebook or Twitter existed. The decline was well under way before the technologies routinely blamed for it were invented; the argument about causation comes later.
The United Kingdom is not a decline case, at least not in the direction the political conversation implies. In 2022, 46% of Britons agreed that “most people can be trusted”, up from 29% in 1999, the lowest recorded figure. UK interpersonal generalised trust has risen substantially over two decades and now ranks high internationally: of 24 countries compared, only five scored higher, led by Norway, China and Sweden.
What has fallen is institutional confidence. Trust in Parliament, in government and in political leadership, the focus of most political commentary, has moved in the opposite direction. Confidence in Parliament fell from 32% in 2018 to 23% in 2022, back to its historic low, over a period that included the Brexit parliamentary crisis and the Covid lockdown conduct revelations. Interpersonal trust and institutional confidence are different constructs, and in the UK they have diverged sharply, moving in opposite directions within the same society over roughly the same period.
Brazil is a third case. Brazilian generalised trust has stayed below 10% in every round of the World Values Survey since the early 1990s, and that series shows no higher level from which it could have fallen. The same deficit shows up at the institutional level. In an OECD review of Brazilian public institutions, based on an April 2022 survey, only about a quarter of Brazilians reported high or moderately high trust in the federal government, and just 14% in Congress. By 2025 trust in the federal government had climbed to 38%, close to the OECD average of 40%, though most Brazilian political and administrative institutions still score below the OECD average.
In Edelman’s 2026 polling across 28 countries, 70% of respondents were unwilling or hesitant to trust someone with different values, different approaches to social issues, or different information sources. Edelman’s measure is new, but the drift behind it is not: in the US, the survey record of falling interpersonal trust stretches back to the 1960s.
Interpersonal vs institutional trust
The distinction between interpersonal generalised trust, the "most people can be trusted" kind, and institutional confidence in Parliament, government, courts and media matters more than the popular conversation acknowledges. The economic work of Knack and Keefer and of Zak and Knack relies primarily on interpersonal generalised trust, because that's what correlates with investment and growth. Institutional confidence is what Edelman and most political pollsters primarily measure. The two are related but distinct constructs. Because the quality of institutions shapes generalised trust, a sustained fall in institutional confidence is a warning sign worth watching, but the UK shows it is not destiny. The two can move in opposite directions for decades, and only tracking both tells a society which problem it has.What institutional substitution costs
The substitution mechanism is not complicated. When informal trust is insufficient to underwrite a transaction, formal institutions step in: legal contracts for implicit agreements, compliance departments for professional norms, monitoring infrastructure for assumed good faith, insurance for expected reciprocity, auditing for reputation.
None of these is free, and much of what they buy is the managed absence of a problem that trust would have prevented far more cheaply.
Legal fees for a contract that wouldn’t exist in a high-trust environment, compliance staff verifying supplier integrity, the insurance premium covering counterparty default in an environment where default is a known risk: the national accounts record the services behind all of it as output, like any other service, with insurance counted as roughly the premiums minus the claims paid out. Aggregate these across an economy and you have a structural tax on economic activity that is booked as production, spread across millions of transactions, with no line showing how much of it exists only because trust is missing.
The tax is there all the same, and in a chronically low-trust economy it’s large, though its precise scale is difficult to quantify.
Back in the courts, the formal cost of enforcing a contract was almost identical in the two countries: about 23% of the claim value in Denmark and 22% in Brazil. The 316-day difference in time is where the burden sits, as capital tied up and commercial decisions deferred while a case runs. The deals that never reached the table, because nobody expected honest dealing, leave no trace in any formal dataset at all.
In Zak and Knack’s growth model, low-trust environments reduce the rate of investment, a prediction that finds substantial support across a broad cross-section of countries. Trust deficits add costs, and they also reduce the willingness to commit capital at all. The Knack and Keefer cross-country data makes the same point: lower-trust countries consistently show lower investment rates, which compound into lower capital stock and then into lower long-run growth, without any of the underlying mechanism showing up as a line item.
In 1993 Robert Putnam published a worked example. Comparing Italian regional governments with equivalent formal structures, comparable resources and similar constitutional frameworks, Putnam found much better institutional performance and economic outcomes in northern regions than southern ones. The north had denser civic networks and higher generalised trust than the south. The formal institutions were the same in both places but worked very differently. Read through the substitution argument, the south had to lean on monitoring and formal procedure for cooperation that the north got informally.
The intellectual genealogy goes back to 1958, when Edward Banfield described “amoral familism”, high family loyalty with minimal civic trust, as the structural condition of southern Italian backwardness. Putnam, three and a half decades later, updated and quantified what Banfield had intuited, and the same mechanism still explained the same differential.
Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson don’t use trust as their central variable, but the mechanism they describe, in which extractive institutions emerge and persist where citizens can’t coordinate to resist elite capture, can be read as the political economy form of low generalised trust.
Where generalised trust is high, citizens can coordinate around shared expectations and hold institutions accountable. Where it’s low, coordination is costly and unreliable, elite capture becomes easier, and extractive institutions become self-sustaining. The causal relationship runs both ways: extractive institutions erode trust further, which degrades the conditions for inclusive governance, which makes trust repair more difficult.
Measuring what's missing
The World Bank's Doing Business project, now succeeded by Business Ready, provides the most systematic cross-country data on formal contract enforcement costs: time in days, cost as a percentage of the claim value, and an index of procedural quality. These figures capture what is visible after a dispute materialises. What they cannot capture is the informal overhead of operating in a low-trust environment before any dispute: the additional due diligence, the higher counterparty risk premiums, the contracts that were more elaborate than they needed to be, the transactions that never happened. This hidden portion is never counted — and economic theory says it can be large: in Zak and Knack's model, low-trust economies pour resources into verifying each other's claims and invest less as a result. If that hidden overhead is heavier where trust is thin, as the theory predicts, a comparison built only on formal enforcement data will understate the real gap between high- and low-trust economies.Why high group cohesion without generalised trust makes things worse
The institutional substitution argument, left there, produces an obvious conclusion: rebuild trust, and the deadweight costs fall. The usual prescription is to strengthen communities, restore civic bonds, encourage local association and recreate the social fabric. It is widely proposed, and Putnam’s own distinction suggests why it often fails.
Bonding social capital connects similar people: family, religious community, ethnic group, neighbourhood. Bridging social capital connects unlike people: strangers, members of different groups, people with no prior relationship. The trust that matters in the growth studies sits closer to bridging: the willingness to extend cooperation to the stranger across a marketplace. Knack and Keefer’s finding is specific on this: group membership measures, which capture the density of formal civic ties, were not independently associated with better economic performance, while the “most people can be trusted” measure was. Bonding capital, by itself, doesn’t produce generalised trust, and under certain conditions it prevents it.
Corruption thrives on high in-group trust combined with low generalised trust. Rothstein and Uslaner work through the logic: inequality generates particularised trust, strong bonds within close networks, and distrust of outsiders. The conditions this creates are those under which corruption functions efficiently. A corrupt relationship requires some minimum trust between its parties, supplied by in-group bonds, while lacking the generalised trust that would generate accountability pressure from outside. Christian Bjørnskov supplied the first link of that chain: of the many candidate explanations he tested across countries, social polarisation, meaning income inequality and ethnic diversity, stood out as one of the few robust predictors of low generalised trust.
The Mafia, also Italian, is a working trust structure: within the network, contracts are enforced reliably, the free-rider problem is solved through credible threat, and internal cooperation is high. What it lacks is generalised trust. The high-trust network extracts from the low-trust general environment around it, and the extraction works because the wider society cannot coordinate resistance. In bonding/bridging terms, internal trust is at its maximum and external trust at its minimum, and the economic result is severe dysfunction.
Easterly and Levine found that ethnic fragmentation explains a significant part of Africa’s poor growth record, because fragmented societies tended to adopt worse policies: too little schooling, distorted exchange markets, high deficits, weak infrastructure. Their explanation is that competing groups struggle to agree on public goods and fight over rents instead, which is the factionalism one would expect from bonding without bridging. Ethnic diversity and growth interact through many channels and the causal claims are contested, but the pattern fits what the bonding/bridging logic predicts.
Strengthening group identity, rebuilding community bonds, encouraging in-group solidarity as a response to generalised trust decline does not automatically produce the kind of trust that matters economically. Under certain conditions, it produces the opposite: high-trust factions in a low-trust general environment. That combination of strong internal bonds and weak external ones is the social configuration from which rent-seeking and institutional capture grow. What matters for economic cooperation is the trust that is hardest to generate: the willingness to deal honestly with people you do not know, have no prior relationship with, and cannot sanction through social pressure. Building communities gives you more bonding capital. Bridging capital comes only incidentally, under specific civic conditions, and not reliably.
Why trust repair outlasts the electoral cycle
Paul Slovic identified the asymmetry at the heart of any trust repair discussion. Trust is typically created slowly, through accumulated consistent experience. It can be destroyed by a single mishap. Establishing trustworthiness takes a large number of confirming instances; disconfirming it takes a relatively small number of relevant negative ones. Bad news about an institution travels faster and lands heavier than good news, and negative trust events have outsized and durable effects.
The 2008 financial crisis destroyed trust in financial institutions across the developed world in months; some of that damage, measured in public attitudes toward banks and regulators, persists nearly two decades on. The Catholic Church abuse scandal, in countries where the Church was a primary trust institution such as Ireland, Poland and the United States, produced trust collapses that formal apologies and institutional reform have not reversed. The UK government’s documented conduct during Covid lockdowns, with parties held while the population complied with rules that carried legal penalties, confirmed a suspicion people already held: that the rules apply differently to those who make them.
That confirmation is not a one-cycle event. It updates a generalised model of how institutions behave, and each further case where the rules turn out not to apply to those who make them reinforces the prior rather than requiring fresh evidence. A model updated once in this direction requires substantially more contrary evidence to move back than it took to move forward. The Slovic asymmetry, applied at the level of institutional credibility, compounds.
The dominant policy response misidentifies the mechanism. The framing is almost always communicative: improve transparency, issue corrections, counter disinformation, communicate performance more effectively. Yet institutional quality itself causally drives generalised trust. In an experiment, researchers exposed participants to institutions of different quality, defined by their ability to prevent corrupt behaviour, and measured trust using a trust game. Better institutions produced more trust, and the mere doubt that corruption might succeed was enough to depress it, even when nobody knew whether any corruption had happened. The experiment didn’t pit messaging against reform, but its lesson for policy is plain enough: trust follows what institutions do.
The time dimension is where democratic politics runs into its structural problem. Rebuilding trust requires sustained, consistent institutional performance at timescales that can exceed electoral cycles. A democracy holds national elections every few years. The incentive structure of electoral competition is designed to produce results on that timescale: policies whose benefits are visible before the next election, reforms that show effects within a parliamentary term. The investments trust repair requires produce benefits long after the politicians who made them have left office. Electoral incentives and trust dynamics simply run at different speeds.
How much faster trust declines than it can be rebuilt cannot be measured exactly from the existing research. The asymmetry is well-documented in the directional sense; specific reconstruction timescales are rarely estimated in the academic literature, and the pace of a past decline says little about how long a reversal must take. Repair can still outrun the political calendar, and no electoral system is designed to reward that. The one recovery in this story is slow: Britain’s slow climb back from its 1999 low took more than two decades.
Social media and the amplification question
The US trust decline from 1960 to 1993 began decades before the web and predates social media entirely. Any account that centres on social media cannot explain three decades of erosion that happened before those technologies existed. This doesn't mean social media has no effect. The mechanism it most plausibly operates through is amplification: negative trust events that previously required newspaper and broadcast cycles to propagate now reach global audiences within hours, so the Slovic asymmetry, the outsized impact of negative events, operates at higher velocity and scale. Social media did not start the decline; its most plausible role is to speed the rate at which each confirming instance of institutional unreliability reaches its audience. Treating it as the root cause, and anti-disinformation policy as the primary intervention, addresses the amplifier while leaving the underlying institutional dynamics untouched.What the evidence says about societies that can’t arrest the slide
The evidence points to persistent, compounding underperformance rather than collapse, operating through self-reinforcing dynamics that the political framing of the problem cannot address, because politicians, competent or not, are solving a different problem.
Rothstein and Uslaner describe a social trap: inequality and corruption erode generalised trust, and low trust makes it harder to build the universal policies that would reduce inequality, so the conditions that destroyed trust persist. The substitution costs described above add an economic turn to that loop, since a low-trust economy pays more to get less done. Nobody knows at what point such a loop stops settling at a new equilibrium and becomes self-sustaining. What the record shows is that recovery is possible but slow: British trust fell from 43% in 1981 to a low of 29% in 1999, then took more than two decades to climb back to 46%. That recovery came while British confidence in Parliament was falling, so it offers no evidence that governments can deliver trust repair on purpose.
Acemoglu and Robinson apply their framework to rich countries too, the United States included; what is new here is reading it through generalised trust. When generalised trust falls below the level needed to sustain inclusive institutions, the political conditions for extractive capture improve. Through ordinary political economy, such as lobbying, regulatory capture and coalition management, elite groups can install governance structures that serve their interests, and they can do it more effectively when citizens cannot coordinate resistance. Effective coordination requires the generalised trust that is failing. Whether the US and UK are tracing the early stages of this pattern remains open.
The high-trust Nordic societies of Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland have broadly kept their high positions in productivity and per capita income for decades, and their generalised trust scores consistently rank among the highest in the world. Natural resources and demographics alone don’t explain that premium, and trust is a plausible part of it: Algan and Cahuc, tracing the trust that descendants of US immigrants inherited from their ancestors’ home countries, found a sizeable causal effect of trust on growth across the twentieth century. If US trust stays at its lowered level, and if Britain’s slide in institutional confidence starts to eat into the interpersonal trust it has rebuilt, the economic literature implies persistent higher transaction costs, lower investment ratios, lower institutional quality, and diminished capacity for the productive cooperation that trust makes cheap and substitution makes expensive.
The public debate about trust decline is framed almost entirely in political and social terms such as polarisation, disinformation, democratic backsliding and leadership failure, and the responses follow suit: messaging, coalition-building, transparency initiatives, counter-disinformation campaigns.
Almost none of it engages with the economic cost, the asymmetry of repair, or the mismatch between tools calibrated to electoral timescales and a process that can run far slower.
Physical infrastructure comes with a depreciation schedule and a maintenance budget. Roads and power grids appear on national accounts because, at some point, someone worked out that infrastructure unmaintained fails, and that failure costs more than maintenance. The accounting framework was built to capture what can be seen.
Social trust works like infrastructure. It determines whether the formal infrastructure of commerce functions efficiently, whether transactions clear at normal cost, whether institutions perform their functions without expending most of their energy on enforcement. It appears on no conventional balance sheet. Finance ministries do not budget for the fiscal implications of falling trust; central banks do not build the trust trajectory into their productivity projections. The GDP accounting frameworks developed across the twentieth century are sophisticated instruments, and they are mute about this.
Across decades, we argued about interest rates, fiscal multipliers and capital buffers, and built central banks and fiscal councils to manage them. The thing that determines whether any of those instruments work was left barely measured, and consequently unmanaged.
When that infrastructure wears down, there is no single event to point to, only a rising overhead on every commercial interaction and a shrinking circle of people it makes sense to deal with. It shows up as stagnation, blamed on globalisation or automation, and managed with tools designed for other problems.
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