This paper provides an introduction to the concept of social capital, and carries out a critical review of the empirical literature on social capital and economic development. The survey points out six main weaknesses affecting the empirics of social capital. Identified weaknesses are then used...

Development policy has been energized in the last decades by a number of contributions emphasizing a new positive role the state can and should play in fostering economic growth. The central pillar of this literature is Michael Porter and his theory of clusters. A number of economists have...

A general equilibrium model has been constructed in a stochastic endogenous growth economy driven by an Ito-Levy diffusion process. The minimum time to “economic maturity” for an underdeveloped economy has been computed both in the preference manifold of the modified Ramsey fashion and in...

The aim of this paper is to show that the dynamics of Schumpeterian economics, in addition to explain the creation of wealth, also implicitly contain the elements of a theory of relative poverty. It is argued that the German tradition of economics, of which Schumpeter is a part, has always...

This paper investigates the effects of religion on a broad set of development outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa. We regroup these outcomes into three broad categories, namely, development process outcomes (growth, investment, conflict, and government quality), institutional outcomes (property...

The paper aims at investigating the dependency of the Russian economy on natural resources, underlining the causes and the possible consequences of this growth model. The analysis tries to evaluate if the Russian manufacturing has contracted the “Dutch Disease”, that is, if a boom in the oil...

The paper presents most recent estimates on the field of cross national digital gaps, in terms of application new information and communication technologies. The author proposes a way of measurement of the digital gaps among countries. The methodology is mainly based on the taxonomy principles,...

This paper questions the existing notion of competition prevalent in economic theory. It is shown that the prevalent idea of competition is incompatible with economic development. Fair competition, this paper argues, ought to be understood in context. The paper ends by providing some preliminary...

Bangladesh capital market is one of the smallest market in Asia but the third largest in the South Asian region. A stock market or equity market is a public entity for the trading of company stock and derivatives at an agreed price. These are securities listed on a stock exchange as well as...

This research advances the hypothesis that reversal of fortunes in the process of economic development can be traced to the effect of natural land productivity on the desirable level of cooperation in the agricultural sector. In early stages of development, unfavorable land endowment enhanced...