The prime premise in Clarence Ayres's Theory of Economic Progress (1962; c1944) is that the pace of advance in a society is driven by cumulative technological evolution. Technology is not tools alone, but encompasses irreducibly the human skills and ideas necessary to make and use tools for...

The paper provides a realistic explanation for the persistently large loan costs in the informal and formal credit markets of South Asia. In the presence of the adverse selection problems that arise from information asymmetries and discrepancies in credit services, price competition in somewhat...