Preliminary findings suggest, in particular, a significant association between GEM [Global Entrepreneurship Monitor] indicators [measurement of different types of entrepreneurial activity] and evangelical-pentecostal-charismatic Christian affiliation.There is more here. HT: Matthew Baker.
In the final page of General Economic History, Weber confidently predicted that capitalism would eventually abandon its religious roots towards a complete rationalization of economic life. Capitalism would eventually create a self-sufficient ethic with minimal religious substance. This raises an important issue that has been surprisingly overlooked in the literature on Weber and Islam. If the religious nature of capitalism in the West diminished or transformed over time as a result of increasing economic rationalization, is this development an inevitable consequence of capitalism? This question unavoidably represents a serious concern to an Islamic society that distinguishes itself chiefly by its religious nature. If such rationalization is in fact inescapable, such an assessment offers clear support to Sadr's incompatibility thesis, as it exposes the contradiction between a rationalizing method and a religious context. More importantly, it proposes an enlightening explanation for the failure of capitalism to develop within Islamic societies. The moral practice of Islamic societies would naturally be at odds with an economic system that gradually eradicates its religious nature. It follows, then, that this incompatibility can only be resolved if the moral practice of Muslims undergoes a radical transformation. But such a transformation entails a shift from “looking to the heavens” to “looking to the earth.” It would mean replacing divine satisfaction with worldly satisfaction.It is very hard to imagine now a Latin America or Africa with "minimal religion substance."
Does culture, and in particular religion, exert an independent causal effect on long-term economic growth, or do culture and religion merely reflect the latter? We explore this issue by studying the case of Protestantism in China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Combining county-level data on Protestant presence in 1920 and socioeconomic indicators in 2000, we find that the spread of Protestantism has generated significant positive effects in long-term economic growth, educational development, and health care outcomes. To better understand whether the relationship is causal, we exploit the fact that missionaries purposefully undertook disaster relief work to gain the trust of the local people. Thus, we use the frequency of historical disasters as an instrument for Protestant distribution. Our IV results confirm and enhance our OLS results. When we further investigate the transmission channels over the long historical period between 1920 and 2000, we find that although improvements in education and health care outcomes account for a sizable portion of the total effects of missionaries’ past activities on today’s economic outcomes, Protestant activities may have also contributed to long-term economic growth through other channels, such as through transformed social values. If so, then a significant amount of China’s growth since 1978 is the result not just of sudden institutional changes but of human capital and social values acquired over a longer historical period.There are interesting graphs at the end. This is one of them:
We find that several religious variables significantly and negatively correlate with a state's productive entrepreneurship score. Alternatively, most religious variables in our data do not correlate significantly with unproductive entrepreneurship. We also find that the percent of individuals reporting as atheist/agnostic is positively associated with productive entrepreneurship.The draft.
The absence of democracy in the Arab–Muslim world is a ‘striking anomaly’ for democratization scholars. This cannot be seen as caused by religion as such, as there are now several democratic Muslim-majority states. Popular explanations such as values, culture, economic development, natural resources, or colonial legacy have been refuted. Based on Ostrom's approach regarding local groups’ ability to establish institutions for ‘governing the commons’, we present a novel explanation for this puzzle, based on historical variations in institutions for financing religion. In Northwestern Europe, religion and secular services managed by local religious institutions have been financed ‘from below’, creating local systems for semi-democratic representation, transparency, and accountability. In the Arab–Muslim region, religion and local secular services have been financed ‘from above’, by private foundations lacking systems for representation and accountability. It is thus not religion, but how religion has been financed, that explains lacking successful democratization in the Arab–Muslim world.Alas, I did not find an ungated draft.
Retrospective questions from recent surveys let us estimate rates of church attendance among children and their parents in ten Western democracies throughout most of the 20th century. We combine these time series with standard sources to test competing theories of religious change. Although our attendance estimates affirm the prevalence of religious decline, our statistical tests offer no support for traditional theories of secularization (which link decline to changes in income, education, industrialization, urbanization, and family life). Nor can we attribute much of the observed decline to growth in the welfare state. But increased school spending by governments does reduce church attendance, and this effect is not the result of greater educational attainment. In shaping the content of schooling, governments may strongly influence long-run religious trends.
We examine the returns from owning cows and buffaloes in rural India. We estimate that when valuing labor at market wages, households earn large, negative average returns from holding cows and buffaloes, at negative 64% and negative 39% respectively. This puzzle is mostly explained if we value the household’s own labor at zero (a stark assumption), in which case estimated average returns for cows is negative 6% and positive 13% for buffaloes. Why do households continue to invest in livestock if economic returns are negative, or are these estimates wrong? We discuss potential explanations, including labor market failures, for why livestock investments may persist.
In Hinduism, the cow is a symbol of wealth, strength, abundance, selfless giving and a full earthly life.20 As almost all the sampled households reported that they were Hindu, they may also derive spiritual returns from cattle ownership. The foregone returns compared to their next best investment alternative would effectively be the cost of religiosity in this context. This of course does not explain the results for buffaloes. P. 14.And the implications for aid:
Our results suggest that merely transferring an asset alone may not be sufficient to generate higher income (beyond the value of the transferred asset). P. 15.
The entrepreneur is a celebrated figure in American society. These innovative risk-takers hold an influential place in the economy and in popular culture. Substantial research has gone into identifying characteristics associated with these individuals, but research on entrepreneurs and religion is surprisingly sparse and inconsistent. Using national survey data, we examine religious affiliation, belief, and behavior for Americans who have started or are trying to start a business. American entrepreneurs appear no different than nonentrepreneurs in religious affiliation, belief in God, or religious service attendance. They do tend to see God as more personal, pray more frequently, and are more likely to attend a place of worship that encourages business activity. A discussion of implications concludes the research note.Source: Dougherty et al (Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, June 2013).
Our basic result is a conditional U‐shaped relation between happiness and religiosity. Countries with high levels of religiosity and countries with low levels of religiosity report higher levels of well‐being than countries with medium levels of religiosity, conditional on the level of income. We argue that this outcome reflects network and long‐run transition effects. P. 18.
Protestant missions from the United States entered the Republic of Korea and Guatemala at the same time (1884 and 1882, respectively). Yet, their impact on human capital has been divergent. The analysis presented in this paper supports the findings of Woodberry (2004, 2009, 2011) and Nunn (2009) in the case of the Republic of Korea. Mainline Protestant missions—Presbyterian and Methodist— promoted the Social Gospel and were the largest in the Republic of Korea implementing successful strategies such as using Korean (Hangul) as the lingua franca in their schools, churches, and medical facilities. Whereas the mainline Protestant denominations in the Republic of Korea successfully promoted investment in human capital, the case of Guatemala does not follow this pattern. Evangelical, Pentecostal, and neo-Pentecostal denominations and churches focused their efforts on evangelizing. Their premilliennialist beliefs translated into an eschatological urgency of conversion with little investment in human capital. As a result, institution-building requisite for investment in human capital (establishing educational institutions and medical facilities) characterized Protestant missions in the Republic of Korea, but not Guatemala. These diverging approaches to exporting Christianity have had differing longterm effects on the two societies.
In South Asia, Muslims made the transition to modern economic life more slowly than Hindus. In the first half of the twentieth century, they were less likely to use large-scale and perpetual commercial organizations and less likely to serve on corporate boards. Providing evidence, this article also explores the institutional roots of the difference in communal trajectories. Whereas Hindu inheritance practices favored capital accumulation within families and the preservation of family fortunes across generations, the Islamic inheritance system, which the British helped to enforce, tended to fragment family wealth. The family trusts (waqfs) that Muslims used to preserve assets across generations hindered capital pooling among families; they were also ill suited to profit-seeking business. Another key difference is that while Hindus generally pooled capital within durable joint-family enterprises, Muslims tended to use transitory Islamic partnerships. Hindu family businesses facilitated the transition to modern corporate life by imparting skills useful in large and durable organizations.
Source: Jeanet Sinding Bentzen (February 2013).Across 800 regions of the World, this research shows that people are more religious when living in regions that are more frequently razed by natural disasters. This is in line with psychological theory stressing that religious people tend to cope with adverse life events by seeking comfort in their religion or searching for a reason for the event; for instance that the event was an act of God. This is termed religious coping. Natural disasters are a source for adverse life events, and thus one way to interpret my findings is by way of religious coping. The results are robust to various measures of religiousness, and to inclusion of country fixed effects, income, education, demographics, religious denominations, and other climatic and geographic features. The results hold within Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, and across continents. To eliminate bias from omitted variables and selection (perhaps religious people are less likely to move out of disaster areas as they see the disaster as an act of God), I further show that second generation immigrants whose mothers descend from natural disaster areas, are more religious than their counterparts with ancestors from calmer areas. Why should economists care? Evidence suggests that religiousness influences economic outcomes (e.g., McCleary & Barro (2003), Iannaccone (1998)).
