Trust thy neighbor?

An important part of doing business with someone is trusting them. Research published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics looks at how much business people in different European countries trust each other.

The results: Almost everyone has a high level of trust for the Swedes and almost not very much trust for the Italians.

The table below displays the average level of trust from citizens of a country (rows) to citizens of a country (columns). 1 =  no trust at all; 2 = not very much trust; 3 = some trust; 4 =  a lot of trust.

Guiso, Luigi, Paola Sapienza, and Luigi Zingales. 2009. “Cultural Biases in Economic Exchange.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics. 124(4): 1095-1131.