Where people are more trusting of non-kin, indicated by numerous voluntary organizations, corporations are more easily formed. The bulk of Trust applies this to scrutinize individual countries' economic development as shaped by culture. The largest German and American firms are far larger than the largest French and Italian firms, and Japan and Korea have far larger firms and more highly-concentrated industries than do Taiwan and Hong Kong. Contrary to myth, America has had strong communitarian as well as individualist tendencies. Fukuyama's thesis is trivially true, a laborious reiteration of old news.
Trust facilitates economic development and cuts transaction costs.
Spontaneous sociability is likely to be helpful from an economic standpoint only if it is used to build wealth-creating economic organizations. I wouldn't have guessed. Trust manifests too a crippling lack of discipline, focus and integration. Rather than dribble out his conceptual discussion of trust among the country studies, which makes his presentation patchy, diffuse and repetitive, Fukuyama should have massed it at the outset. Excruciatingly turgid and lengthy discussion of industrial structures, family structures, inheritance, etc. is only tenuously linked to trust.