Guilds, efficiency, and social capital: evidence from German proto-industry

This article considers recent economic theories about guilds in the light of evidence from a German proto-industrial region. The empirical findings cast doubt on views that guilds existed because they were efficient institutional solutions to market failures relating to product quality, training, and innovation. However, guilds did generate a 'social capital' of shared norms, common information, mutual sanctions, and collective political action. This social capital benefitted guild members, but harmed outsiders and the wider economy. The article concludes that economic theories of collective action and interlinked markets can explain why guilds were widespread while not necessarily being efficient.     

Environmental Entitlements: Dynamics and Institutions in Community-Based Natural Resource Management

While community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) now attracts widespread international attention, its practical implementation frequently falls short of expectations. This paper contributes to emerging critiques by focusing on the implications of intracommunity dynamics and ecological heterogeneity. It builds a conceptual framework highlighting the central role of institutions — regularized patterns of behavior between individuals and groups in society — in mediating environment-society relationships. Grounded in an extended form of entitlements analysis, the framework explores how differently positioned social actors command environmental goods and services that are instrumental to their well-being. Further insights are drawn from analyses of social difference; “new”, dynamic ecology; new institutional economics; structuration theory, and landscape history. The theoretical argument is illustrated with case material from India, South Africa and Ghana.     

Serfdom and social capital in Bohemia and Russia1

The ‘horizontal’ social capital generated by networks and communities is widely regarded as inherently antagonistic to ‘vertical’ hierarchies such as serfdom. This article examines this view using evidence from pre‐Emancipation Bohemia and Russia. It finds that serf communes generated a substantial ‘social capital’ of shared norms, common information, and collective sanctions. But communal social capital was manipulated by village elites who collaborated with overlords in taxation, land regulation, and demographic control. This benefited communal oligarchies, but harmed ordinary serfs and the wider economy. Horizontal social capital and vertical hierarchies, the article demonstrates, can as easily collude as conflict.     

Participation and Poverty Reduction: An Analytical Framework and Overview of the Issues

This paper examines the relationship between community participationand the efficacy of interventions designed to reduce poverty.It outlines a simple model that identifies three actors involvedin the provision of antipoverty interventions: financiers, providersand beneficiaries. This model is used to illustrate what happenswhen the poor move from being passive beneficiaries to beingthe providers of these interventions. Beneficiary participationhas the potential to lower the cost of providing these interventions.It can ensure that they more closely reflect the preferencesof the population that they are designed to serve. However,this benefit is contingent on the ability of communities toengage in collective actions. In fractionalised communities,or where trust and/or social capital are weak, there is a riskthat community participation may result in the capture of benefitsby local elites, to the detriment of the poor. Further, we arguethat the failure to delegate true decision-making authority(allowing for de jure but not de facto participation), may resultin beneficiaries being reluctant to act because of concernsthat they will be subsequently overruled.     

国内外社会资本与旅游研究文献综述

社会资本包含集体社会资本和个体社会资本。通过对Elsevier，Springer link和CNKI等平台上的文献进行梳理发现：在旅游领域，社会资本理论研究主要集中于集体和个体社会资本对旅游发展影响以及旅游对目的地社会资本影响等方面，研究呈现出内容上集中于社会资本对旅游的影响，方法上以案例分析为主的特点，当前仍存在不足，并提出今后研究的趋势，为以旅游创新助力乡村振兴，关注特色小镇发展模式，促进文化旅游可持续等，更好地运用社会资本理论来解释和解决旅游活动中的现象和问题，促进旅游业可持续发展。     

Institutional Pressures to Provide Social Benefits and the Earnings Management Behavior of Nonprofits: Evidence from the U.S. Hospital Industry

This study examines the relationship between institutional pressures to provide social benefits and the discretionary accrual behavior of nonprofit firms. I examine this issue within the context of U.S. nonprofit hospitals, an economically significant and politically rich setting where firms face considerable institutional pressure to provide an important social benefit: charity care. I argue that institutional pressures on nonprofits to provide higher levels of social benefits imply that lower profits should be reported. I develop theory and provide evidence which suggests that, due to competing private incentives to report higher profits, nonprofit managers strategically use discretionary accruals to increase accounting earnings when the social benefits their firms have provided in the current period exceed external stakeholders' normative expectations. The findings from this study inform the ongoing political debate regarding the appropriateness of tax exemptions for U.S. nonprofit hospitals and should therefore be of interest to both regulators and policymakers. In addition, this study provides timely insights for researchers regarding how institutional pressures can affect managers' reporting behaviors in other settings where similar competing reporting incentives exist between managers' private benefits and stakeholder expectations related to social benefits.     

自由贸易试验区建设与地区产业结构转型升级——基于中国286个城市面板数据的实证分析

自由贸易试验区建设是我国进一步深化改革和扩大开放的重要举措,是地区产业结构转型升级的"政策红利"和"制度红利"。文章基于2004-2018年中国286个城市数据,探讨了自由贸易试验区的设立对地区产业结构转型升级的影响、异质性差异以及作用机制。研究结果表明：自由贸易试验区建设有效促进了地区产业结构转型升级。从分区域的结果来看,自由贸易试验区建设对东部城市产业结构转型升级的促进效应明显高于中部地区,对西部地区产业结构转型升级的效果不明显。文章进一步从资源配置和制度供给两个维度检验了自由贸易试验区建设的外部调节和内在作用机理,研究发现：自由贸易试验区建设有效调节了资本要素的作用路径,增强了资本要素对产业转型升级的促进作用,尚未实现对劳动力要素的有效正向调节。同时,自由贸易试验区建设主要通过制度供给效应促进地区产业结构转型升级,而东部地区制度供给效应显著高于中部地区。     

粤港澳大湾区创业风险投资网络演化及影响因素研究

创业风险投资是科技企业获取权益资本融资的一项重要金融制度安排，在粤港澳大湾区和社会主义先行示范区的国家战略规划下，大力发展创业风险投资能推动粤港澳大湾区国际科创中心建设，进一步发挥金融对实体经济的服务与支持作用。文章基于社会网络分析视角，通过构建大湾区创业风险投资城市联系网络，从投资金额、项目分布、整体网络密度、核心-边缘结构等方面分析大湾区创业风险投资网络的时空演化特征，并探究其影响因素。研究发现：大湾区创业风险投资发展顺应宏观环境的波动，城市群内部形成港深广三大集聚中心，存在显著的空间、阶段分布不均衡的特征；港深广形塑了大湾区创业风险投资的网络关系，网络规模、联系日益加强，并呈现出"东密西疏"的放射状格局；港深广的集聚效应显著，边缘城市之间的投资联系仍较弱；经济环境、创业企业、创投机构、制度因素对大湾区创业风险投资联系有显著影响，其中经济及制度作用强度占主导。     

Religiosity and household income in Sekhukhune

Literature analysing the interrelation of religion and economic performance suggests religion to explain differences in household income. Religious communities foster economically conducive attitudes and are important sources of social capital, particularly under weak economic structures. This paper targets at investigating effects of religiosity on rural household income using survey data from Greater Sekhukhune in the Limpopo Province of South Africa. Using insights from religious studies within a conceptual framework of rural household decision-making, the authors estimate an income equation that includes measures for religious affiliation. While church membership per se does not reveal a significant effect on household income, the results show a positive and robust relationship for membership in the Zion Christian Church and the practice of African traditional religion.     

精英身份与农民创业：趋名还是逐利？

农村精英群体因具有独特的优异特质和能力素养成为农村创业的主力军，但是农村精英能否通过创业实现"名利双收"？学术界尚无定论。文章利用上海财经大学"千村调查"的数据得到以下研究结论：①农村精英的创业并非纯粹的"逐利"行为，而是追随内在的"趋名"导向，农村精英创业主要是为了实现家庭社会地位的提高、村落人缘水平的改善、村落话语权的增加等非经济目标，这种"趋名"导向使得创业者配置于经济目标的注意力资源相对不足，进而制约了其"逐利"目标的实现。②随着家庭经济资本的增加，农村创业者的精英身份对经济目标的注意力配置不足问题将得到有效缓解，即丰裕的家庭经济资本将弱化精英身份对实现经济目标的制约效应；同时，家庭经济资本的增加将进一步强化精英身份对非经济目标的提升作用。③随着外部制度环境的完善，精英身份对农民创业经济目标的注意力配置不足问题将得到有效缓解，即完善的外部制度环境将弱化精英身份对实现经济目标的制约效应；同时，外部制度环境的完善将强化农村精英群体对非经济目标的追求。本文基于创业动机理论与注意力基础观分析了精英身份在农民创业过程中的经济效应与非经济效应，探讨了农村精英群体在"趋名"与"逐利"之间的权衡与取舍，并将家庭经济资本与外部制度环境纳入研究框架，构建了一个较为系统的农民创业模型，丰富了农民创业理论的研究范畴。     

Growth Constraints and Determinants of a South Pacific Island in a Global Economy: A Study of Fiji

Abstract

In a global economy, the South Pacific islands face unique constraints to growth. The study investigates whether Fiji was benefited by three-decade old open trade policies. Through a multivariate cointegration analysis, the study establishes the existence of a long-run relationship between open trade policy and physical and human capital resources. Although physical capital had a positive impact on growth, the existing complementary relationship between two kinds of capital requires that a threshold between physical and human capital needs to be attained before any negative influence on growth can be transformed into positive impact.     

Exploring social capital of emerging farmers from Eksteenskuil,South Africa

The objective of this paper was to quantify the levels of social capital of emerging raisin producers from Eksteenskuil, and to explore the relationship between the socio-economic characteristics of the farmers and their social capital levels. The respondents prove to have high levels of social capital. Interestingly, they tend to trust and get along with each other more than they actively participate in organised group activities in the community. Their social capital thus can be said to be more cognitive than structural. Higher levels of social capital were also found to be associated with higher age, experience and education levels of the respondents. Ultimately it was concluded that the complexity of social capital makes it difficult to implement initiatives that will contribute to developing the social capital levels of these farmers. Efforts to stimulate collective action and farmer-to-farmer skills transfer should take cognisance of the role of social dynamics in the behaviour of emerging farmers.     

The financial contracts of large firms

Abstract

Representative European and American institutionalists, such as Hilferding, Schumpeter, Gerschenkron, Cameron, Veblen and Commons, have all, from their various perspectives (eg. the micro, the meso or the macro level), emphasized the role of the banks in industrialization. Their interest in the institutional factors affecting capital markets has been passed on to the so-called neo-institutionalists. Thus, for example, the work by Williamson and Hodgson on the origins of long-term economic and social contracts draws on the older institutionalist concept of a transactions economy. The content of the concept of an “institution” within neo-institutionalism, however, has been broadened to include not just the general organization of the economy but also the rules, habits and customs followed by economic actors.     

Notes on neoinstitutional economics

Abstract

In mainstream economic theory — neoclassical economics — one had for a long time taken for granted that the institutional framework of social interaction had to be treated as something exogenously given and beyond the explanatory and analytical realms of theory. Institutions were for sociology and political science to handle, not for pure economics. More recently, however, the scope of economic theory has been widened through the incorporation of institutions. This has to a large extent grown from an increasing awareness of the farfetched consequences of the institutional presumptions on which much of the earlier theorizing was built. The analysis is therefore broadened by supplementing the hard core with institutional analysis. One has even attempted to explicate the economic rationale of the formation or sustenance of institutions by endogenizing them, e. g. by applying different kinds of evolutionary theories.     

Increasing yield and farm income of upland farmers: The case of Panay Island Upland Sustainable Rural Development Project in the Philippines

The 17th Sustainable Development Goal aims to enhance the international cooperation between developed and least-developed countries, and the Official Development Assistance (ODA) program is the largest source of external support in the attainment of this goal. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effects of the Panay Island Upland Sustainable Rural Development Project (PIU-SRDP), an ODA project supported by the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) in partnership with the Department of Agriculture and the Local Government Units of project municipalities in the Philippines. We focused on Phase II of the PIU-SRDP, which implemented randomly various agriculture-based income-generating projects, aimed at improving the sustainable productivity of low-income farming households. Based on a spatial and intertemporal variations of the project, we exploit a difference-in-difference approach using household-level data. The results suggest that the project significantly increased the rice yield and farm income of beneficiaries. With the opposing views about the true impacts of ODA programs, our study shows evidence of the positive effects of an ODA project on farmer-beneficiaries. This study provides insights for future engagement and implementation of related community-based ODA, agriculture, and rural development projects.     

Between responsibility and rhetoric: some consequences of CSR practice in Nigeria's oil province

This article brings together some of the findings of a three-year study of the community dimensions of upstream petroleum operations in Nigeria, Africa's largest oil exporter. It examines the corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices of transnational petroleum-producing companies, focusing on the immediate and long-term ethnographic and social consequences of such practices on the local communities where oil extraction takes place. The article examines, more importantly, how such practices and the identified consequences intersect with the regulatory/institutional framework governing upstream petroleum operations in Nigeria. By shifting attention away from the dominant, ethnic view of conflict and instability in the country of study, and looking at specific instances of ethnographic and social crisis associated with corporate social responsibility, the article offers some insights into some present-day challenges to sustainable development in Africa, and unveils an important present-day mechanism through which the image of resource-rich African countries as strife-torn is entrenched.     

Institutional arrangements of outgrower sugarcane production in Southern Africa

ABSTRACT

Management models are needed that empower local communities to produce biofuel feedstock in a manner that drives rural development. Much can be learnt through the accumulated experiences of sugarcane outgrower schemes in southern Africa. Early schemes provided limited empowerment, but protected outgrowers from the risks of volatile sugar value chains. In later schemes, processing plants were responsible for all operations and simply paid dividends to participating farmers. More recent schemes offer full ownership, which comes with greater rewards and empowerment, but also exposure to risks. The underlying institutional structures of outgrower schemes largely dictate their performance, and thus the factors that affect their viability or collapse. To understand the different institutional arrangements of sugarcane outgrower schemes we undertake a comparative analysis of 13 schemes in southern Africa employing a political economy framework that uses the three key questions: ‘who owns what’, ‘who does what’, and ‘who gets what’.     

社会资本对公共项目管理绩效影响的实证研究——以知识共享为中介变量

社会资本作为公共项目的客观情景因素,能够弥补公共项目中正式制度的不足并改善项目管理绩效。文章分析了社会资本三个维度对管理绩效的影响,围绕着公共项目管理绩效的可控影响因素,引入知识共享作为中介变量,在公共项目中构建出“社会资本→中介变量→公共项目管理绩效”的假设模型,并依此完成实证研究。结构方程模型（SEM）的验证结果表明,在社会资本与公共项目管理绩效之间的作用关系中,知识共享充当了中介变量的角色,社会资本各构面在不同程度上对公共项目管理绩效产生间接的正效应。     

From growth studies to microhistory: Finnish economic and social history in the 1990s and early 2000s

Abstract

Economic and social history was already being practised in Finland before the Second World War, although it became established as an independent academic discipline only after the war. The terms social history or economic history were not used then; what we now recognise for instance as social history was then called “cultural history” or “history of the culture”. This approach was often characterised the collective approach to distinguish it from the individualistic approach of more historicist study. Nearly all economics research was historical before the 1950s, and practically all professors of economics were actually historians by training and had defended their dissertations in history, usually after having studied some economic problem of the past. But our discipline has also other roots. In Finnish universities the discipline called social policy, usually included in faculties of social science, has always had strong ties with social history.     

The history of the city of Trondheim

Abstract

The study of ‘local history’ i.e. the history of particular towns and rural districts, has been much in vogue in Norway in the last twenty or thirty years and has produced some valuable results of significance for more general history. The initiative in studies of this kind, as well as the burden of financing them, has usually been assumed by the communities themselves, and it is natural that the purely local interest in particular events, institutions, and persons has had to be emphasized more than might be desirable from a more comprehensive point of view. Apart from this obvious limitation, there is a good case to be made for the study of social history in particular at the level of relatively small communities. The limited material and scope of such studies make it possible to go into greater detail in the analysis of social relations within the unit under observation and, equally important, to see a relatively complete social system functioning as a whole. When a series of such studies has been made, a basis is then provided for comparisons and generalizations which cover a larger national society.