Politicians and international organisations advocate for increased regulation and government control of industry in order to handle climate change and reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions. However, it remains an open question how economic freedom is associated with environmental damage and...

The aim of this paper is to explore whether the concept of social capital as popularized by Robert Putnam is a good social science concept. Taken Gerring’s work on concept evaluation as the starting point, the paper first presents a set of criteria for conceptual ‘goodness’ and discusses...

The World Values Survey contains an item on ownership, which is polled 200 times in 92 countries at the four waves of 1990, 1995, 2000 and 2005. It is developed into the CS-score that measures the aggregate mass support for capitalism and socialism. Four hypotheses are advanced and tested to...

This paper outlines how inflows of foreign aid might push up the real price of investments and thus crowd out private investments. The main implication - that aid leads to increasing real investment prices - finds substantial support in panel estimates from 78 developing countries. The effects...

This chapter provides a selective survey of the literature on the association between social trust and economic growth. The chapter is divided into two main sections. The first section outlines the main theoretical arguments for how social trust could affect the long-run growth rate and economic...