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Social cohesion' as used in this paragraph follows the terminology of international organizations. Recent sociological literature keeps the expression 'social solidarity' in reference to Durkheim´s original work and reserves the term social cohesion for present definitions. Jamaat et al. (2009) argue that 'social cohesion' has been used in the Anglo-Saxon literature as a translation for the French solidarité social. Meanwhile, in the philosophical literature, critical theory refers to solidarity in very close association to Durkheim and the sociological tradition, and thus in very close connection to social cohesion, whereas in pure ethical reflection, solidarity is understood as a disposition to reciprocal or asymmetrical aid to others. In the latter case, cohesion results from an individual or social ethical virtue.

work is licensed under a Creative Commons IGO 3.0 Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC-IGO BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO) license (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/igo/legalcode) and may be reproduced with attribution to the IDB and for any noncommercial purpose. No derivative work is allowed.Any dispute related to the use of the works of the IDB that cannot be settled amicably shall be submitted to arbitration pursuant to the UNCITRAL rules. The use of the IDB's name for any purpose other than for attribution, and the use of IDB's logo shall be subject to a separate written license agreement between the IDB and the user and is not authorized as part of this CC-IGO license.Note that link provided above includes additional terms and conditions of the license.The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Inter-American Development Bank, its Board of Directors, or the countries they represent.http://www.iadb.org 2015 AbstractIn 2006 Uruguay's Parliament voted to establish a system of individual livestock traceability that would initially be mandatory for bovine populations, and in future stages will encompass all domestic animals for sale and consumption. Besides attaching electronic eartags to each individual carrying unique identifier information, the system has the capacity to generate individual level databases and customized reports, with the government's compliance controls acting as completeness guarantees. The amount and other characteristics of the data being accumulated would suggest that there would be space for innovators to come up with alternative uses of those inputs to generate new lines of business or strengthen the competitive advantage of the livestock industry. This exploratory paper describes key features of two firms and a multi-member consortium that are taking advantage of the traceability system to produce valuable services to the industry and are considering ideas for future developments that would deepen the synergies. Prior to that, but implicit in the whole discussion, is the issue about the nature of the traceability system as a good. While the adoption of a strong public good rhetoric and logic was key to the successful implementation of traceability nationally, the proliferation of profitable spinoffs may bring up the issue of financing the system and dealing differently with public good and for profit services based on it.

Institutions and their quality are central concepts in the recent development and institutional economics literatures. Our hypothesis is that inadequate contract enforcement has hindered investment and, in consequence, indirectly has had a negative effect on Uruguay's long-term growth performance. We first review the main concepts and the approaches to define and measure the quality of contract enforcement. We then introduce one measure that has the advantages of being measurable into the past and not depending on subjective judgments; namely, the "contract intensive money" (CIM) indicator proposed by Clague et al. (1999). Using our long series for the CIM indicator, and extending key macroeconomic variables backwards to 1870, we are able to estimate a structural model to explore the plausibility of our hypothesis. In the estimation, based on the seemingly unrelated regressions (SUR) method, we find support for the thesis that the quality of contract enforcement influences growth through its impact on investment. Put differently, our results suggest that poor contract enforcement played a significant role at the root of Uruguay's underperformance, and in its experience of (relative) long-run decline.