Presented by Simone Manfredi
Author: Simone Manfredi
Abstract
Background.
Social capital can drive local ability to meet community needs, both promoting citizen claim for public services and enabling local collaborative governance. Italy is an example of non-social investment reform without clear provision to tackle new social risks. An inadequate supply of childcare, a defamilisation instrument, is identified as a key factor explaining the coexistence of low female labour market participation and low birth rates.
Objectives.
Exploiting Italian territorial variation, this study theorizes how and test whether social capital is an explaining variable in the divergent provision of public childcare services.
Methods.
A regression analysis is held adopting the Italian provinces (NUTS-3 level) as the unit of analysis (n=107). The provision of public childcare services (dependant variable) is operationalized by the number of available public spot every 100 children aged 0-2. The social capital embedded within the community of a Province is operationalized by two composite indicators accounting for its bonding (strong “family” ties) and bridging (weak trust-based ties) dimensions. Additional control variables are included in the model.
Results.
The computed proxies of social capital are good predictor of supply of public childcare at Italian province level. Controlling for female employment rate and average per-capita disposable income, bonding social capital exhibits a strong negative regression coefficient (-1.57) and bridging social capital a strong positive coefficient (+2.57), both statistically significant (p-value<0.05).
Conclusions.
This study contributes to the understanding of the characteristics of the Italian North–South gap in the specific policy field of Early Childhood Education and Care. It introduces the concept of social capital to the social investment literature, theorizing and empirically showing how an uneven distribution of social capital predicts the uneven distribution of public childcare services. Future studies need to substantiate these preliminary findings by looking at demand side (individuals) and supply (institutional) side mechanisms.