Social resources like trust and shared identity make it easier for people to work and play together. Such social resources are sometimes referred to as social capital. Thirty years ago, Americans built social capital as a side effect of participation in civic organizations and social activities, including bowling leagues. Today, they do so far less frequently (Putnam 2000). HCI researchers and practitioners need to find new ways for people to interact that will generate even more social capital than bowling together does. A new theoretical construct, SocioTechnical Capital, provides a framework for generating and evaluating technology-mediated social relations.

This paper draws on our new database on bank regulation and supervision in 107 countries to assess different governmental approaches to bank regulation and supervision and to evaluate the efficacy of specific regulatory and supervisory policies. First, we assess two broad and competing theories of government regulation: the helping-hand approach, according to which governments regulate to correct market failures, and the grabbing-hand approach, according to which governments regulate to support political constituencies. Second, we assess the impact of an extensive array of specific regulatory and supervisory practices on banking-sector development and fragility. These policies include regulations on bank activities and the mixing of banking and commerce; regulations on domestic and foreign bank entry; regulations on capital adequacy; deposit insurance system design features; supervisory power, independence, resources, loan classification stringency, provisioning standards, diversification guidelines, and prompt corrective action powers; regulations on information disclosure and fostering private-sector monitoring of banks; and government ownership of banks. The results raise a cautionary flag regarding reform strategies that place excessive reliance on country's adhering to an extensive checklist of regulatory and supervisory practices that involve direct government oversight of and restrictions on banks. The findings, which are much more consistent with the grabbing- hand view than the helping-hand view of regulation, suggest that regulatory and supervisory practices that (1) force accurate information disclosure, (2) empower private-sector corporate control of banks, and (3) foster incentives for private agents to exert corporate control work best to promote bank perf...

Woolcock, and Manfred Zeller for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Thanks are also due to the participants of seminars at Cornell University, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), and the IRIS Center at the University of Maryland. Management and processing of the data was expertly handled

The trouble with the zealots of technology as an instrument of democratic liberation is not their understanding of technology but their grasp of democracy (Barber, 1997: 224) Governments throughout the developed world have recently embarked upon a new wave of initiatives which draw upon the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). The false starts and fragmented projects of the past have now been superseded by the Internet. The arrival of the graphical browser in the early 1990s, and its fast-approaching ubiquity in the early twenty-first century, has caused a paradigm shift. One does not have to subscribe to technological determinism to argue that the interconnectedness facilitated by the Internet far exceeds anything available before. It is more obvious than ever that ICTs are capable of reshaping structures of governance. How this might occur is the subject of this paper. We argue that there are three basic models of interaction between the state and citizens which may underpin the practice of ‘e-government’. Each is an ideal type in the Weberian sense- a heuristic tool for identifying and classifying the main features of a set of phenomena, with a view to rendering complex processes more intelligible and comparable in a way that aids further empirical research (Weber, 1947). Our three categories are not meant to be mirror-images of reality. Rather, they represent the distinctive characteristics of each model of

This paper interprets case studies and theory on community involvement in beneficiary selection and benefit delivery for social safety nets. Several considerations should be carefully balanced in assessing the advantages of using community groups as targeting agents. First, benefits from utilizing local information and social capital may be eroded by costly rentseeking. Second, the potential improvement in targeting criteria from incorporating local notions of deprivation must be tempered by the possibility of program capture by local elites, and by the possibility that local preferences are not pro-poor. Third, performance may be undermined by unforeseen strategic targeting by local communities in response to national funding and evaluation criteria, or by declines in political support. Keywords: poverty alleviation; targeting; safety net; political economy; community; welfare. ** Williams College, Department of Economics, Williamstown, MA and Institute for Economic Development, Boston University. jconning@williams.edu; Santa Clara University, Department of Economics, Santa Clara, CA 95053. mkevane@scu.edu (corresponding author). We would like to extend our thanks to Harold Alderman, Pranab Bardhan, John Blomquist, Henry Bruton, Michael Cernea, Nora Dudwick, John Giles, Margaret Grosh, William Jack, Emmanuela Galasso, Eric Hanson, Simon Harrigan, Daniel Klein, Alexandre Marc, Jessica Mott, Akbar Noman, Albert Park, Tamara Perkins, Ashok Rai, Vivajendra Rao, Gustav Ranis, Martin Ravallion, Mary E. Schmidt, Endre Stiansen, William Sundstrom and participants at a World Bank workshop for providing input, suggestions and material. Nishant Nayyer provided able research assistance.

Africa’s disappointing economic performance, the East Asian financial crisis, and the weak record of the former Soviet Union have focused attention on the role of institutions in determining a country’s economic growth. This article critically reviews the literature that tries to link quantitative measures of institutions, such as civil liberties and property rights, with growth of gross domestic product across countries and over time. An important distinction is made between indicators that measure the performance or quality of institutions and those that measure political and social characteristics and political instability. The evidence suggests a link between the quality of institutions and investment and growth, but the evidence is by no means robust. I wish to assert a much more fundamental role for institutions in societies; they are the underlying determinant of the long-run performance of economies. North 1990: 107 The role of institutions in promoting growth in developing and emerging economies has sparked renewed interest in recent years (World Bank 1993, 1997; Stiglitz 1998). A burgeoning literature thus seeks to determine the extent to which the quality of public and private economic institutions, the particular structure of governance, and the extent of social capital (or civic engagement) affect growth. Evidence from global cross-country econometric studies is potentially important because the paucity and weakness of both macroeconomic and institutional data for many developing countries preclude robust policy interpretations on a country-by-country basis (Srinivasan 1995; Lal and Myint 1996). If there is clear evidence that weak political and economic institutions significantly hamper growth, policymakers might propose measures that strengthen institutions in particular ways or that encourage more appropriate political structures

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In recent years, comparative economics experienced a revival, with a new focus on comparing capitalist economies. The theme of the new research is that institutions exert a profound influence on economic development. We argue that, to understand capitalist institutions, one needs to understand the basic tradeoff between the costs of disorder and those of dictatorship. We then apply this logic to study the structure of efficient institutions, the consequences of colonial transplantation, and the politics of institutional choice.

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To identify the effect of social capital on financial development, we exploit the well-known differences in social capital (Banfield (1958), Putnam (1993)) across different parts of Italy. In areas of the country with high levels of social capital, households invest less in cash and more in stock, are more likely to use checks, have higher access to institutional credit, and make less use of informal credit. The effect of social capital is stronger where legal enforcement is weaker and among less-educated people. These results are not driven by omitted environmental variables, since we show that the behavior of movers is still affected by the level of social capital present in the province where they were born.