This paper provides an introduction to the concept of social capital, and carries out a critical review of the empirical literature on social capital and economic development. The survey points out six main weaknesses affecting the empirics of social capital. Identified weaknesses are then used...

A general equilibrium model has been constructed in a stochastic endogenous growth economy driven by an Ito-Levy diffusion process. The minimum time to “economic maturity” for an underdeveloped economy has been computed both in the preference manifold of the modified Ramsey fashion and in...

This paper investigates the effects of religion on a broad set of development outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa. We regroup these outcomes into three broad categories, namely, development process outcomes (growth, investment, conflict, and government quality), institutional outcomes (property...

The paper aims at investigating the dependency of the Russian economy on natural resources, underlining the causes and the possible consequences of this growth model. The analysis tries to evaluate if the Russian manufacturing has contracted the “Dutch Disease”, that is, if a boom in the oil...

The paper presents most recent estimates on the field of cross national digital gaps, in terms of application new information and communication technologies. The author proposes a way of measurement of the digital gaps among countries. The methodology is mainly based on the taxonomy principles,...