The proposition that social capital expands household welfare is tested by estimating the effects of social interactions on per capita expenditure among a sample of 810 households in northern Bangladesh. Using data from BRAC’s 2004 Social Capital Survey, ordinary least square (OLS)...

Available evidence suggests high intergenerational correlation of economic status, and persistent disparities in health status between the rich and the poor. This paper proposes a novel mechanism linking the two. Health human capital is introduced into a two-period overlapping generations model....

This paper draws on the experiences of the Far East Economic Crisis in 1998 and argues that: (1) the poor depended heavily on bonding social capital during the Crisis, but the crunch-point beyond which they felt no longer able to rely on this is less certain; (2) bridging social capital could...

Modern epidemiology has, by and large, been based on a narrow model of biomedicine and behaviour modification. It fails to answer, for instance the following questions: Why certain populations are inflicted with certain kinds of disease, and why the access to its cure and prevention is so...

This paper shows that the realization of Singapore’s vision of “active citizenship†and “state-society partnershipâ€, to a significant extent, depends on how social capital is being created and renewed in Singapore’s evolving political landscape.[Working Paper 9]

The executive summary reports on major findings from a survey conducted among a random sample of 1,054 Singaporeans and Permanent Residents aged 18 to 65. Focus is on views of public policies in three areas, namely, political participation, social capital and trust and provision of public goods...

This paper addresses two sets of questions related to IT development and lessons to be drawn for other regions both in and outside India. Firstly, based on original fieldwork an additional argument to traditional location literature is deployed. Secondly, related research on the financial...

In "Bowling Alone," Putnam (1995) famously argued that the rise of television may be responsible for social capital's decline. I investigate this hypothesis in the context of Indonesian villages. To identify the impact of exposure to television (and radio), I exploit plausibly exogenous...

This paper claims that the roots and remedies of health inequalities reflected in the major academic debates that culminated with full force towards the turn of the last century, have done little to usher in a radical change in public health discourse. There has been a hesitation to understand...

Using a model of O-ring production function, the paper demonstrates how certain communities can get caught in a low-literacy trap in which each individual finds it not worthwhile investing in higher skills because others are not high-skilled. The model sheds light on educational policy. It is...