This report is intended to help Australians address the question, ‘Has life in our country got better, especially during the past decade?’

Peter Kearns provides a consolidation of national and international work discussing the contribution vocational education and training (VET) provides to social capital, and the implications this concept has for VET policy and practice.

Using the concept of “ethnic community capital” and using data provided by 344 ethnic communal organisations, this paper outlines major social, economic, and spatial aspects that have helped establish Sydney as a multicultural capital on the Pacific.

In this paper Wendy Stone, Matthew Gray and Jody Hughes investigate the extent to which an individual's 'stock' of social capital relates to labour force outcomes, over and above more well established determinants. In particular, they examine how family and kinship networks, friends and neighbours relate to individual labour market outcomes, compared with the role...

Little is known about social capital in practice, since measurement of the concept remains an emerging field. Drawing on data from the institute's Families, Social Capital and Citizenship survey of 1500 Australian households, Wendy Stone and Jody Hughes aim to contribute to the development of theoretically based and empirically valid measures of social capital that...