This chapter surveys the major contributions to the rapidly growing empirical literature on social capital and economic performance, focusing primarily on cross-country approaches. It first addresses characteristics of governments that fall under broad definitions of the term social capital. It...

Empowerment of the poor does not necessarily make them better off – or make the non-poor worse off. In some cases, empowerment may be inefficient, i.e. a negative-sum game. In other cases, it is a zero-sum game, as the poor can benefit only at the expense of someone else. But in many cases, it...

This article presents a statistical study of the determinants of democracy in the postwar period. Important variables are found to be former status as a British colony, island status, the share of the population professing Islam, the percentage of European descent, penteration of the English...

Zak & Knack (2001) demonstrate that interpersonal trust substantially impacts economic growth, and that sufficient interpersonal trust is necessary for economic development. To investigate the ability of policy-makers to affect trust levels, this paper builds a formal model characterizing public...

This paper summarizes progress made in a DfID-funded World Bank initiative to test and develop policy-relevant, politically acceptable, quantitative indicators of governance. There are two major components involved in the process of generating indicators that are practical means of reform....

Considers the development of the European economies from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution to argue that the accumulation of physical and human capital played a major role in the escape from the Malthusian trap.

For several decades, the international community has aspired to integrate the social, economic and environmental dimensions of sustainability. Yet, no country has achieved the patterns of consumption and production that could sustain global prosperity in the coming decades. Thus, with the...

Indeed, it has been asserted that the most fundamental resource in the modern economy is knowledge while the most important process of economic development is learning. Therefore, e-commerce is an important contributor to the learning process which shapes economic performance. In fact, it...

As by product of economic growth, jobs are indeed transformational. In other words, efficiency increases as workers get better at what they do (as more productive jobs appear and less productive one disappear). In fact societies flourish as jobs bring together people from different ethnic and...

Culture can now be used as an instrument for sustainable economic growth and developmental instrument of cities. By reorganizing the socio-economic fiber of cities and using cultural activities for economic growth, we can drive these cities towards sustainable development. This was successfully...