The effects of immigration on the socio-economic landscape of the United Kingdom

Former research detected the paradox of high quality formal institutional background accompanied by a low level of social trust in the United Kingdom. The aim of the current paper is to solve this initial puzzle. As traditional social capital literature is not able to explain the low level of trust in this case, we propose a comprehensive approach incorporating the analysis of immigration, integration, inequality and access to justice data to shed light on trust-eliminating mechanisms. The social and economic aspects are examined in the matrix of extra-community network, intra-community trust, radius of trust and need for formal external enforcement. Four factors – concentrated highly diverse areas, tight communities living next to each other with limited extra-community links, minorities’ high exposure to deprivation and limited access to justice – are identified as the origin of our puzzle. As social trust plays a fundamental role in enhancing economic growth, the trust-impeding mechanisms explored in the current paper shall be of great importance