Abstract

Empirical research on the determinants of economic growth typically neglects the influence of religion. To fill this gap, this study uses international survey data on religiosity for a broad panel of countries to investigate the effects of church attendance and religious beliefs on economic growth. To isolate the direction of causation from religiosity to economic performance, the estimation relies on instrumental variables suggested by an analysis in which church attendance and religious beliefs are the dependent variables. The instruments are variables for the presence of state religion and for regulation of the religion market, the composition of religious adherence, and an indicator of religious pluralism. Results show that economic growth responds positively to religious beliefs, notably beliefs in hell and heaven, but negatively to church attendance. That is, growth depends on the extent of believing relative to belonging. These results accord with a model in which religious beliefs influence individual traits that enhance economic performance. The beliefs are an output of the religion sector, and church attendance is an input to this sector. Hence, for given beliefs, higher church attendance signifies more resources used up by the religion sector

Highlights

  • Previous research by economists has used the experience of a broad panel of countries to assess the determinants of economic growth—see, for example, Barro (1991, 2000) and Barro and Sala-i-Martin (2003, Ch. 12)

  • We defined a measure of attendance or belief for a country to be the value from World Values Survey (WVS) 1990 if available, we filled in with the value from WVS 1981 if the 1990 value was unavailable. (We adjusted for the average discrepancy between the two values among countries that had information for both years.) If neither of these values were available, we used in an analogous way the value for International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) 1991, WVS 1995, ISSP 1998, and Gallup 1999

  • Summary of Main Findings Our empirical work used a cross-country panel that includes country level information on church attendance and religious beliefs. These data derive from individual information collected in six international surveys between 1981 and 1999

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Summary

Published Version Citable link Terms of Use

Barro, Robert J., and Rachel M. McCleary. 2003. Religion and Economic Growth across Countries. American Sociological Review 68, no. 5: 760-781. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1519761 http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:3708464 This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-ofuse#LAA

Introduction
State regulation
Standard deviation
Findings
Protestant share
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