In the late 1990s, as economists looked back the development period in Africa since 1970s, they put forward the notion “African growth tragedy” , meaning that Africa's poor growth and resulting low income is associated with low schooling, political instability, underdeveloped financial...

This chapter reviews the recent debate about the role of social capital in economics. We argue that all the difficulties this concept has encountered in economics are due to a vague and excessively broad definition. For this reason, we restrict social capital to the set of values and beliefs...

Although Jordan reached middle-income status more than three decades ago, the country has not made the additional leap, like most developing countries in the Middle East, to become a high-income economy. In this paper, we argue that institutions, namely formal rules (constitution, judiciary,...

Production began to decline, more and more signs of recession occurred, the GDP diminished in real terms so that the signs of economic crisis became visible in all components of the social system (and in the culture subsystem, as well). In this context, the unanimous striving for international...

I investigate the consequences of long-run persistence of a societies’ preference towards cultural goods. Historical cultural activity is approximated with the frequency of births of classical composers during the Renaissance and is linked with contemporary supply of cultural activities in...

The formal precision of modern economics, with its theoretical abstraction, its mathematical analytics and its reliance on disinterested scientific method in testing hypotheses about how economic system behave, might suggest that economics as a discipline does not have a cultural context, that...