Social Ties and Economic Performance

This volume focuses on the social impact of the public sector on the performance of the private sector, especially in the long term. It presents a model of the formation of social ties by economic interaction and uses this to explore the relevance of social ties and their dynamics for economic performance. The impact of public provision and stochastic migration on social ties and the (total) provision level of the public good are also examined. It discusses the role of social ties in other types of interaction, and proposes definitions of social capital and infrastructure. Furthermore, it contains a discussion of the connections between the different conceptions of these terms. Also the effects of social ties and the influence of different types of public intervention on growth are examined. The assumption of exogenously determined, stochastic migration is dropped, and migration behavior is analyzed explicitly. In this theoretical investigation of the dynamics of social ties and economic interaction a number of important effects on economic performance will be suggested.