Social trust is linked to both public sector size and to economic growth, thereby helping to explain how some countries combine high taxes with high levels of economic growth. This paper examines if social trust insulates countries against the negative effects of public sector size on growth, documented in several studies. We note that the effect is theoretically ambiguous. In panel data from 66 countries across 40 years, we find no robust evidence of insulation effects: when excluding countries with uncertain trust scores, our results suggest that big government hurts growth also in high‐trust countries, and that the mechanism is by lowering private investments. (JEL H10, O11, P16, Z10)

中文翻译：

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在高增长的国家中，大型政府是否会损害增长？

社会信任与公共部门的规模以及经济增长都息息相关，从而有助于解释一些国家如何将高税收与高水平的经济增长结合在一起。本文研究了社会信任是否使国家免受公共部门规模对经济增长的负面影响的影响，这在几项研究中都有记载。我们注意到，这种效果在理论上是模棱两可的。在过去40年中来自66个国家的面板数据中，我们没有发现任何有效的绝缘效应证据：当排除信任评分不确定的国家时，我们的结果表明，大型政府也会损害高信任度国家的经济增长，并且该机制是通过降低私人资本投资。（ JEL H10，O11，P16，Z10）