Increasingly, social capital, defined as shared norms, trust, and the horizontal and vertical social networks that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutually beneficial collective action, is seen as an important asset upon which people rely to manage natural resources and resolve conflicts. This paper uses empirical data from households and community surveys and case studies, to exami...

How do taxes affect human capital accumulation? This question has been studied extensively in the context of two model classes: overlapping generations (OLG) and infinite horizon (IH) models. These embody very different assumptions about the intergenerational transmission of physical and human capital. OLG models typically abstract from intergenerational linkages, while IH models implicitly ass...

BACKGROUND Little is known about social capital and health among older adults in South Africa. This study investigates the association between social capital and several health variables, namely: self-rated health, depressive symptoms, cognitive functioning and physical inactivity, among older South Africans. METHODS We conducted a national population-based cross-sectional study with a nation...

Many political economists believe that competition among countries—or regions within them—to attract mobile capital disciplines their governments, motivating them to invest more in infrastructure, reduce waste and corruption, and spend less on non-productive public goods. The result should be convergence on business-friendly policies and clean government. The notion that mobile capital discipli...

Natural capital is essential for goods and services on which people depend. Yet pressures on the environment mean that natural capital assets are continuing to decline and degrade, putting such benefits at risk. Systematic monitoring of natural assets is a major challenge that could be both unaffordable and unmanageable without a way to focus efforts. Here we introduce a simple approach, based ...

By adapting theories for the decline of mutualism developed in evolution and natural sciences, we put forward an explanation for the decline of social capital based on its obsolescence. In our economy, agents with specific knowledge are “held up” by their principals. Inside communities, agents learn about each other and thereby engage in mutual aid, preventing the hold-up. As they learn about e...

BACKGROUND Although social capital as a key determinant of health has been well established in various studies, little is known about how lifestyle factors mediate this relationship. Understanding the cross-relationships between social capital, health, and lifestyle factors is important if health promotion policies are to be effective. The purpose of this study is to explore whether different d...

BACKGROUND A growing number of studies have suggested a link between social capital and health. However, the association may reflect confounding by factors, such as personality or early childhood environment, that are unmeasured prior common causes of both social capital and health outcomes. The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of social capital on physical and mental health ...

Conventional wisdom about the relationship between income distribution and economic development has been subjected to dramatic transformations in the past century. While Classical economists advanced the hypothesis that inequality is bene…cial for economic development, the Neoclassical paradigm, which had subsequently dominated the …eld of macroeconomics, dismissed the Classical hypothesis and ...

We study the mechanisms according to which social infrastructure influences the preservation of physical capital and, consequently, economic growth. The presented model considers that social infrastructure is a specific type of human capital, which acts in order to preserve already existing physical capital, by, e.g. reducing the incentive for rent seeking or corruption. Using an innovative met...