This paper explores how social capital is related with self-rated health status in Japan and how this relationship is affected by gender, using data for 3075 adult participants in the 2000 Social Policy and Social Consciousness (SPSC) survey. Controlling for endogenous bias, unobserved city...

Annotated remarks made at the 50th Anniversary Conference “Fortalecimiento institucional de los bancos centrales y efectividad de la política monetaria”, of the Central Bank of Nicaragua, February 2010. The paper lays out the importance of institutional strenthening (governance) as an...

The main question of this paper is to investigate if and how the voluntary sector – as an institutional agent of the third sector - matters for the local development path. By adopting a multimensional and relational approach to the development, the paper surveys, compares and overlaps three...

The aim of this survey is to explain the real impact of aid on governance in the developing countries: including the subsahara and the MENA region during the period 1990-2004 by using the “threshold theory”. Stephen Knack proved that foreign aid had a harmful impact on the governance of the...

Corruption is a symptom and outcome of institutional deficiency, with potentially adverse effects on economic growth. This paper aims to provide a synthesis of the existing evidence on the relationship between corruption and economic growth - controlling for effect type, data sources, and...

This paper compares more direct measures of the institutional environment with both the instability proxies used by Barro (1991) and the Gastil indices, by comparing their effects both on growth and private investment. The results provide substantial support for the position that the...