ceo_esq
31st January 2004, 12:01 PM
A NYT article (http://www.iht.com/articles/127458.html) picked up in today’s International Herald-Tribune reports on some new research into the relationship between religion and economic development: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 is what two Harvard scholars have found after analyzing data collected in 59 countries from 1981 to 1999. "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 American Sociological Review.
...
As the team began its research, 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 United States, one of the most religious nations in the world.
And over the past 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.
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, Luigi Zingales of 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.
In 50 countries, they analyzed the relationship between religion and attitudes toward cooperation, the market economy, laws and women. "On average," they wrote, "religious beliefs are associated with good economic attitudes, where good is defined as conducive to higher per capita income."Look for the Bush Administration to introduce a faith-based economic stimulus package in the first quarter of next year. :rolleyes:
At least that is what two Harvard scholars have found after analyzing data collected in 59 countries from 1981 to 1999. "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 American Sociological Review.
...
As the team began its research, 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 United States, one of the most religious nations in the world.
And over the past 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.
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, Luigi Zingales of 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.
In 50 countries, they analyzed the relationship between religion and attitudes toward cooperation, the market economy, laws and women. "On average," they wrote, "religious beliefs are associated with good economic attitudes, where good is defined as conducive to higher per capita income."Look for the Bush Administration to introduce a faith-based economic stimulus package in the first quarter of next year. :rolleyes: