Social Capability and Economic Growth

Jonathan Temple and Paul Johnson

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1998, vol. 113, issue 3, 965-990

Abstract: 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.

Date: 1998
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (231)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1162/003355398555711 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:113:y:1998:i:3:p:965-990.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is currently edited by Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer and Stefanie Stantcheva

More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().