Notas panorámicas de la literatura sobre capital social y desarrollo: el papel de la religión

In recent years empirical research about economic growth’s determinants has tended to incorporate political and social factors as explanatory variables, motivated by the evidence arisen from traditional analysis that the differences in countries’ economic performance can not be explained based only on economic factors. One stream of this branch of investigation considers the role of culture, from which religion is an important component. A second line of investigation, related with the previous one, has to do with the role in economic development of what is called “social capital”. Although these new approaches of investigation has strongly developed, in countries like ours the role of social capital, religion and other measures of “culture” has usually been ignored in empirical analysis. For this reason this paper attempts to contribute to the discussion of these topics presenting the main antecedents of these new approaches and analyzing the current state of the investigation about them.