Social capital might be a new production factor which must be added to human and physical capital, or it might enter as a reduction in either transaction or monitoring costs. The paper discusses both direct and indirect ways of measuring social capital. The crucial question is whether social capital can be changed. This paper also addresses how much harm totalitarian regimes do to social capital when they expand their area of central control. SCI Working Paper No. 12, September 1999.
Ethnicity plays an ambiguous role in the great transformation.
Using data drawn largely from Africa, this paper explores the two faces of ethnicity. In so doing, it finds that the presumed link between ethnicity and violence is more complex and less threatening than most assume. Those who claim a straightforward link are making an elementary error in the reading of tabular data. SCI Working Paper No. 13, June 1999. The project described in this paper stratified villages in Rajasthan watersheds in terms of high, medium or low performance in their restoration of degraded or vulnerable common lands.