| Abstract | Social capital is not only important but also complicated and subtle. Although the poor people who are poor in both physical capital and human capital, want to share the positive externality of social capital, the inter-subjectivity of social capital formation may exclude the extremely poor people from being benefited, so the social capital cannot function in one-way to poor people. Therefore, it is conditional and threshold that social capital to improve the welfare of poor population. This paper put the theoretical model, proposed by Chantarat & Barrett (2010), into empirical analysis based on data of China rural household surveys. Through the microeconometric analysis of the threshold effect of social capital, we get affirmative conclusions. To a certain extent, This paper makes up for deficiencies, in the existing literatures on poverty trap, which mainly focus on the macro level but on micro level, and pay more attention to model construction and less to empirical test. This paper not only reconciles the conflict of some empirical analysis of the relationship between social capital and the poor’s welfare, but with more importance, finds the conditions and environment which the poor’s social capital plays a positive role, so it has a positive and practical significance for anti-poverty. |