Forget investment and savings rates, worker productivity and wage scales to determine which countries will become richer or poorer. What really stimulates economic growth is whether you believe in an afterlife -- especially hell.
At least that's what two Harvard scholars have found after analyzing data collected in 59 countries between 1981 and 1999.
PHOTO: NY TIMES PHOTOS
"Our central perspective is that religion affects economic outcomes mainly by fostering religious beliefs that influence individual traits such as honesty, work ethic, thrift and openness to strangers," the researchers, Robert Barro and Rachel McCleary, wrote in the October issue of American Sociological Review. They also happen to be married.
"For example, beliefs in heaven and hell might affect those traits by creating perceived rewards and punishments that relate to `good' and `bad' lifetime behavior," they wrote.
The data comes from six international surveys, including ones by Gallup, the World Bank and researchers at the University of Michigan. They include questions about attendance in places of worship and religious beliefs. There were four measures of economic development: per capita GDP, educational attainment by adults, the urbanization rate and life expectancy.
Oddly enough, the research also showed that at a certain point, increases in church, mosque and synagogue attendance tended to depress economic growth. Barro, a renowned economist, and McCleary, a lecturer in Harvard's government department, theorized that larger attendance figures could mean that religious institutions were using up a disproportionate share of resources.
"It's all been rather surprising," McCleary said."People didn't believe you could quantify aspects of religion. We wanted to be intellectually provocative. We see about five more years of study to get out all the stuff we want. We're trying to raise interesting questions in a different way."
Since the German sociologist Max Weber wrote about the Protestant work ethic and the spirit of capitalism, social scientists have argued that culture -- including religious habits -- is part of the complex mix that determines a country's economic health. What distinguishes the work of Barro and McCleary, some scholars said, is that it uses a sophisticated analysis of a huge set of data to quantify the arguments of anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists.
"The study's important less for what they found than that they looked," said Mark Chaves, a professor of sociology at the University of Arizona, in Tucson. "They are not the first to look at this but they are the first to look at this as systemically and as rigorously as they have. For forever, people have been saying that culture matters in analyzing economies."
"I think this is a new beginning for the rigorous relationship between religion and economic development, " added Chaves, whose forthcoming book examines how religious congregations influence politics and culture. "They've given us a data set and some tools to examine this in a new way."
One of the motivations for undertaking the study, McCleary said, was that empirical research on economic growth typically neglected the influence of religion.
The research team also wants to look at how religion affects other political and social issues like democracy, the rule of law, fertility and health. At the moment, they have a paper on government and the regulation of religion that is under review by the American Journal of Sociology at the University of Chicago on government and the regulation of religion.
Some of their findings, which have been written about in The Economist and The Christian Science Monitor, first appeared in 2002 as a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research.
As the couple began their study, McCleary said, it was clear that the widely discussed secularization thesis -- the idea that a country becomes more secular as it becomes richer and more industrialized -- did not apply to the US, one of the most religious nations in the world.
And over the last 30 years, many East Asian countries, including Malaysia, Singapore and South Korea, have experienced both rapid economic growth and the spread of Christianity, Barro said.
"South Korea is a good example of that rapid growth and more religion," he said. There the number of converts from Confucianism and other Eastern religions to Christianity is growing rapidly, he explained.
Some of the lowest levels of religiosity were found in China and North Korea. The lowest levels of economic growth were in sub-Saharan African countries. The former East Germany (which includes Weber's birthplace) was one of the lowest in both religiosity and growth.
But one of the major challenges to such research is that countries that vary in their religious beliefs and practices also vary in ways that have nothing to do with religion, said Paola Sapienza, a professor of finance at Northwestern University.
"Are you really picking up religion or something that correlates with it, like certain laws or social and economic institutions?" she asked.
Last year, in the Journal of Monetary Economics, Sapienza and her colleague Luigi Zingales at the University of Chicago, and Luigi Guiso, of the University of Sassari in Rome, published a paper that did not compare countries but looked at the relationship between religious beliefs and the attitudes shown to foster economic growth.
"On average," they wrote, "religious beliefs are associated with good economic attitudes, where good is defined as conducive to higher per capita income."
But that study found that more religious people were also less tolerant of other races and nationalities and had more negative attitudes toward women. The study based its findings on World Values Surveys data collected at the University of Michigan.
Barro and McCleary also used data from the World Values Surveys, which Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, has been taking for more than 20 years. His surveys of 78 countries show strong links between widespread public values and beliefs, or political culture, and motivation to work, sexual and religious norms and the presence or absence of democratic institutions.
"I find that belief factors play a major role in economic growth, but here is one of the world's leading economists saying so," Inglehart said, referring to Barro. "When Weber argued that big breakthroughs in economic growth were in Protestant countries, it was at a time when many cultures were shaped by Protestant institutions. His notion in the broadest sense is that belief factors play a role in economic factors."
"This is a revised view of the Protestant ethic," he continued. He noted that many mostly Protestant, wealthy countries were now more interested in quality of life, and that many Eastern countries were now more focused on economic growth -- with some populations even converting, as Barro noted, to Christianity and specifically to Protestantism.
"Confucian countries are now the most Protestant countries on earth, in terms of a moral imperative to work hard, save money, to do well," Inglehart said.
AIR SUPPORT: The Ministry of National Defense thanked the US for the delivery, adding that it was an indicator of the White House’s commitment to the Taiwan Relations Act Deputy Minister of National Defense Po Horng-huei (柏鴻輝) and Representative to the US Alexander Yui on Friday attended a delivery ceremony for the first of Taiwan’s long-awaited 66 F-16C/D Block 70 jets at a Lockheed Martin Corp factory in Greenville, South Carolina. “We are so proud to be the global home of the F-16 and to support Taiwan’s air defense capabilities,” US Representative William Timmons wrote on X, alongside a photograph of Taiwanese and US officials at the event. The F-16C/D Block 70 jets Taiwan ordered have the same capabilities as aircraft that had been upgraded to F-16Vs. The batch of Lockheed Martin
GRIDLOCK: The National Fire Agency’s Special Search and Rescue team is on standby to travel to the countries to help out with the rescue effort A powerful earthquake rocked Myanmar and neighboring Thailand yesterday, killing at least three people in Bangkok and burying dozens when a high-rise building under construction collapsed. Footage shared on social media from Myanmar’s second-largest city showed widespread destruction, raising fears that many were trapped under the rubble or killed. The magnitude 7.7 earthquake, with an epicenter near Mandalay in Myanmar, struck at midday and was followed by a strong magnitude 6.4 aftershock. The extent of death, injury and destruction — especially in Myanmar, which is embroiled in a civil war and where information is tightly controlled at the best of times —
Taiwan was ranked the fourth-safest country in the world with a score of 82.9, trailing only Andorra, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar in Numbeo’s Safety Index by Country report. Taiwan’s score improved by 0.1 points compared with last year’s mid-year report, which had Taiwan fourth with a score of 82.8. However, both scores were lower than in last year’s first review, when Taiwan scored 83.3, and are a long way from when Taiwan was named the second-safest country in the world in 2021, scoring 84.8. Taiwan ranked higher than Singapore in ninth with a score of 77.4 and Japan in 10th with
China's military today said it began joint army, navy and rocket force exercises around Taiwan to "serve as a stern warning and powerful deterrent against Taiwanese independence," calling President William Lai (賴清德) a "parasite." The exercises come after Lai called Beijing a "foreign hostile force" last month. More than 10 Chinese military ships approached close to Taiwan's 24 nautical mile (44.4km) contiguous zone this morning and Taiwan sent its own warships to respond, two senior Taiwanese officials said. Taiwan has not yet detected any live fire by the Chinese military so far, one of the officials said. The drills took place after US Secretary
RSS