Aiming to explain the European divide with respect to social and political values, scholars in the past have relied on a simplified four- (or even two-) dimensional regime model which tranches the continent according to the social capacities of its inhabitants. This „cartography“ of...

Although social capital has been considered of the utmost importance for development and poverty alleviation by governments and NGOs, it remains a complex and elusive concept. Different dimensions of social capital form part of the puzzle: cooperation is an individual other-regarding preference;...

Debates about the appropriate role of markets and governments are often shaped by sharply contrasting opinions. Based on individual data from the World Values Survey and the European Values Study for up to 190,000 respondents in a sample of 68 democratic countries, we find that social trust is...

In the year 2007 It was held the research project called “Measuring Trust, Trustworthiness and Pro-Sociality in Six Latin American Cities”: Bogotá, D.C, Buenos Aires, Caracas, Lima, Montevideo and San José de Costa Rica. The purpose of this study was to analyze the interaction between...

The concept of social capital has gained importance within economic studies only until the present decade. This article analyses the origin and evolution of the concept of social capital, it also establishes its connection with the economic growth of nations basically through two ways: that...

The goal of the article is to highlight the importance of institutions, organizations and social capital within the growth process, either as efficiency or inefficiency promoters. This is particularly valid for underdeveloped countries which are characterized by an inefficient institutional...

Measurement quality is a fundamental factor in determining the cost of transactions within organizations and markets. A huge gulf separates the meaningfulness and precision of business metrics as currently achieved from the quality that has been routinely obtained for decades in research and in...

In Europe differences among countries in the overall change in happiness since the early 1980s have been due chiefly to the generosity of welfare state programs— increasing happiness going with increasing generosity and declining happiness with declining generosity. This is the principal...

Since 1972 the General Social Survey (GSS) has asked a representative sample of US adults "[are] you very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?" Overall, the population is reasonably happy even after a mild recent decline. I focus on differences along standard socio demographic dimensions: age,...

Research evidence on the impact of relative income position on individual attitudes and behaviour is sorely lacking. Therefore, this paper assesses such positional impact on social capital by applying 14 different measurements to International Social Survey Programme data from 25 countries. We...