Although social institutions permeate the world in which we live, they are all but absent from our analyses of economic growth and development. This paper argues the need to mitigate this omission by demonstrating the importance of social institutions for growth and development while focusing on institutions providing social safety nets. Social institutions and policies render individual behavi...

In this paper, we present a simple model that offers a unified framework for the analysis of economic growth and economic development. In our model, the transformation of production relationships, a key feature of the process of economic development, goes hand-in-hand with economic growth. The main driving force of this pattern is that economic growth in relatively backward economies is associa...