At the World summit for social development in Copenhagen in 1995 the member states committed themselves to “creating an economic, political, social, cultural and legal environment that will enable people to achieve social development” (Commitment 1). This overall commitment was followed by nine additional commitments, which to a large extent can be seen as means to achieve social development; o...

A system with a self-similar property is scale-independent and statistically exhibits that property at all levels of observation. In addition, a power law describes the distribution of a scale-independent property. Many investigators have observed social activities and structures, particularly in the science system, that are best described by a power-law distribution. However, unlike classical ...

social interaction requires the ability to understand people’s mental states (their intentions, desires and believes). the ability for attributing mental states is called “theory of mind.” theory of mind leads the person to explain and predict behavior. researchers showed a great interest in the relation of language and mind/language and thought. some researchers focused on methodological conce...

Based on individual and macro-level data collected in 18 OECD democracies, we find that income inequality at the macrolevel depresses electoral participation. At the level of individual citizens, we find that the effects of income differentials are linear: individuals who are below the median income in society are less likely to participate in elections, while those above the median income are ...

The phenomenon of rising wage inequality has been extensively documented in OECD countries. In the final quarter of the last century it appears to have been particularly marked in the US and UK. The drivers of rising inequality have been subject to econometric analysis and the relative roles of trade and skill-biased technical change evaluated. In this paper, we take an alternative approach, na...

Maintaining Social Ties: Social Capital in a Global Information Age John F. Helliwell Abstract Recent research has documented that social and economic relations remain strikingly local, at least especially when viewed in the light of many discussions of globalization. The main evidence for this is that the density of social and economic exchanges declines far more with distance, and with the cr...

This paper presents an overview of our current state of knowledge regarding poor motivation of 14-16 year old school pupils in the UK. A number of experts in the field from a variety of disciplines presented papers on this topic to a series of seminars held at the London School of Economics between 2002 and 2003. These papers, summarised here, present evidence from a historical, comparative, an...

Public and private expenditure on educational institutions accounts for about 6% of the collective GDP of the OECD member countries, or roughly $1,300 billion dollars each year. This figure understates the true opportunity cost of educational investments, since it does not take into account forgone earnings. Overall, it should be clear that the provision of education represents a major commitme...

The escalating costs of traditional social security systems are forcing countries to reevaluate the formal programs that provide income maintenance support to the aging. This article suggests a reform strategy built around three systems, or “pillars,” to provide old-age security—a public pillar with mandatory participation, a private, mandatory savings plan, and a voluntary savings system. Thre...