One of the most important issues in rural development is empowerment and entitlement of farmers through participation. Decentralisation and participation are seemingly interdependent. Therefore, the paper begins with a theoretical discussion on the cause and effects of this interdependence....

TABLE OF CONTENTS: Preface; Gertrud Buchenrieder and Tom Dufhues. Issues and evidence of social networks in boosting rural households' welfare; Gertrud Buchenrieder. Open issues and implications for measuring individual social capital in developing countries; Tom Dufhues and Gertrud Buchenrieder. What...

This paper investigates the effects of network based individual social capital on the access of rural households to services. In the context of development economics, an innovative data collection approach is used to determine network based social capital. The approach originates from the field...

Social capital has been recently held up as a conceptual framework to build a bridge between the diverse disciplines involved in rural development. However, despite its potential and the impressively rapid take-up of the concept by the community of development professionals, it remains an...

This paper investigates the effects of individual social capital on the access of rural households to services. In the context of agriculture economics, an innovative data collection approach is used to determine social capital. The approach originates from the field of sociology and entails a...

This study shows how different forms of individual social capital affect access to formal credit in rural Thailand. In the context of agriculture economics, an innovative data collection approach is used that originates from the field of sociology (personal network survey). We measure social...

Social capital has been recently held up as a conceptual framework to build a bridge between the diverse disciplines involved in rural development. However, despite its potential and the impressively rapid take-up of the concept by the community of development professionals, it remains an...

TABLE OF CONTENTS: Preface; Gertrud Buchenrieder and Tom Dufhues. Issues and evidence of social networks in boosting rural households' welfare; Gertrud Buchenrieder. Open issues and implications for measuring individual social capital in developing countries; Tom Dufhues and Gertrud Buchenrieder. What...

Although interest in the structure and relational features of social capital and its underlying networks has grown since the early 1990s, the terms do not embody any ideas that are really new to sociologists, but are indeed rather new to economists. Until the 1950s, land, labour, and financial...

Most policy and research interest regarding rural credit markets revolves around the perception that poor households in developing countries lack access to credit, which is believed to have negative consequences for household welfare. An important feature of the rural credit market is that...