Social capital and development: concept, theories and empirical evidence from rural Madagascar.

Summary Since the mid-1990s, the notion of social capital seems to have enjoyed a certain popularity in the economic literature. Originally, it was a concept developed by the sociologist P. Bourdieu, but very quickly the concept of social capital expanded to refer to all social interactions within a society. One of the consequences of this drift was to consider that institutions are a form of capital, which led to a renewed interest in endogenous growth models. Among the many limitations of this approach, the main problem lies in the abundance and imprecision of definitions of social capital, so that it appears to be a catch-all concept. In order to overcome this difficulty, this study proposes to reinterpret Bourdieu's definition from a microeconomic perspective. Thus, social capital is defined as the set of rights that an individual has over the resources of his or her social network. This definition makes social capital an asset that households can use in case of need.