Is Social Capital Part of the Institutions Continuum and is it a Deep Determinant of Development?

social capital, institutions, determinants of development

Inequality and Economic Growth: The Empirical Relationship Reconsidered in the Light of Comparable Data

Income inequality, Expenditure distribution, Economic growth

Informal Institutions and Cross-Country Income Differences

There is a growing literature which analyses, using cross-country data, whether institutions or geography is the most important deep determinant of income per capita. The empirical proxies used for institutions in this literature, however, focus only on formal institutions, rather than informal institutions, despite the fact that North (1990) emphasised the importance of informal institutions. We include a measure of informal institutions, a concept we argue is closely related to social capital and cultural norms, in a representative deep-determinants framework and find informal institutions to be just as important a deep determinant of income levels as are formal institutions.Institutions, deep determinants, social capital, culture.

Is social capital part of the institutions continuum and is it a deep determinant of development?

There is a growing literature which analyses, using cross-country data, whether institutions or geography is the most important deep determinant of economic development. The empirical proxies for institutions used in this literature focus on the definition of institutions, formal and informal. This study argues that the concept of informal institutions is similar to social capital. However, the social capital and ‘institutions as a deep determinant’ literatures rarely acknowledge the existence of the other. It is argued that social capital meets the criteria for being a deep determinant of development and that both the cross-country literature on social capital, and the deep determinants of development literature, could be enriched by empirically modelling social capital as a deep determinant of development

Informal institutions and cross-country income differences

There is a growing literature which analyses, using cross-country data, whether institutions or geography is the most important deep determinant of income per capita. The empirical proxies used for institutions in this literature, however, focus only on formal institutions, rather than informal institutions, despite the fact that North (1990) emphasised the importance of informal institutions. We include a measure of informal institutions, a concept we argue is closely related to social capital and cultural norms, in a representative deepdeterminants framework and find informal institutions to be just as important a deep determinant of income levels as are formal institutions

A new hardware architecture for genomic and proteomic sequence alignment

Los Alamitos, US

Quantifying Compliance Costs for Small Businesses in New Zealand

This paper reports on a small-scale study of the compliance costs of small New Zealand businesses. Participating firms were asked to keep a record of both time spent and expenditure directly incurred over a thirteen-week period. This differs from previous studies that rely on a firm's recall of how much time has been spent on compliance over the previous year. The results suggest that New Zealand small businesses on average spend less time and money on compliance than has been indicated in previous studies. However a number offirms do perceive compliance to be a major issue and in some cases this perception prevents firms from expanding