This paper explores the issue of whether countries with high levels of social capital give more foreign aid than others. It is often argued that in countries with high levels of social capital (as measured, for example, by trust, civic norms and membership of community groups) levels of...

All of the recent empirical work on the relationship between income inequality and economic growth has used inequality data that are not consistently measured. This paper argues that this is inappropriate and shows that the significant negative correlation often found between income inequality...

Previous empirical work on the effect of government intervention on economic performance has used government spending as a proxy for intervention. This proxy is imperfect as many East Asian economies have low levels of government spending but high levels of government intervention. This paper...

The paper introduces the concept of social divergence, defined as the social barriers to communication and exchange between individuals and groups of individuals within a society. Social divergence is determined by the characteristics of a society, including the distribution of income,...