On August 29, 2005, the nation watched as Hurricane Katrina pummeled the Gulf Coast, inflicting more than $100 billion of property damage across broad swaths of Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, and Alabama and ultimately claiming more than 1,600 lives (Franklin 2006; McMillan 2006). In the wake of...

In this paper, we examine the resiliency of community recovery after a natural disaster. We argue that a resilient recovery requires robust economic/financial institutions, political/legal institutions, and social/cultural institutions. We explore how politically and privately created disaster...

As the literature on social capital has emerged over the past two decades, both advocates and critics of the concept have grappled with the question what is the nature of this phenomenon known as 'social capital?'. By viewing this question through the lens of Austrian capital theory...

Group lending and business training programs aimed at small-scale entrepreneurs have captured the interest of development scholars, practitioners, and donors since the 1980s. Yet these strategies have not had much impact in the context of urban Zimbabwe. Building upon ethnographic research...

The microfinance movement has gained tremendous popularity over the past 30 years, but it is still far from meeting its full potential. The industry stands at a crossroads between increased commercialisation and increased philanthropic aid. Standard economic discourse does little to resolve the...

At the center of all Don Lavoie search interests was his passion for understanding how social learning takes place how society can achieve a level of intelligence and coordination that far surpasses the intelligence and abilities of any individual or group of individuals within society. In...