The conventional wisdom is that postwar economic growth has been unpredictable. In the 1960s few observers accurately forecast which countries would grow quickly. In this paper we show that indexes of social development constructed in the early 1960s have considerable predictive power. These results indicate the importance of "social capability" for economic growth. We emphasize that social arrangements matter for reasons beyond those discussed in recent work on trust and social capital. However,we are also able to show that one of the indexes may be a useful proxy for social capital in developing countries.
Download Info
To our knowledge, this item is not available for
download. To find whether it is available, there are three
options:
1. Check below under "Related research" whether another version of this item is available online.
2. Check on the provider's web page
whether it is in fact available.
3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be
available.
Length: Date of creation: Nov 1996 Date of revision: Publication status: Published in Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1998, 113(3): 965-90. Handle: RePEc:vas:papers:37
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)