Religion and Economic Growth across Countries

By Robert J. Barro, Rachel M. Mccleary. American Sociological Review, 2003

1,713 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Demography, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b5cdf9a910d4a31c56afe73e6ddefe26b1f1780d

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Citations in the corpus

Culture, Ethnicity, and Diversity (2017, background): “4) Belief in hell, used in Barro and McCleary (2003): f035 (belief in hell).”
Was Weber Wrong? A Human Capital Theory of Protestant Economic History (2009, neutral): “What is less well known today is that he also explicitly favored the advancement of universal schooling, for the simple reason that people had to be literate in order to be able to read God’s Word, the Bible.”
Are Any Growth Theories Robust (2008, result): “…is measured by linguistic fractionalisation as constructed by Alesina et al. (2003) and a measure of the degree of tension within a country 3 We deviate from previous studies (Barro and McCleary, 2003; Durlauf et al., 2005) by not employing religiosity measures (i.e. measures of religious beliefs).”
Risk aversion and religion (2012, positive): “The data we have on self-reported religious beliefs and practices allow us to study whether links between risk aversion and religion are related to particular religious beliefs, or to the social aspects of activities associated with religious practice (Barro and McCleary 2003; Gebauer et al. 2012).”
Religious affiliation religiosity and male and female fertility. (2008, background): “Religious participation includes such behaviors as church attendance, participating in church-related activities, viewing/listening to religious broadcasts, and reading the holy books of the religion (Barro and McCleary 2003; Corijn 2001; Myers 1996).”
Presidential Address: Social Transmission Bias in Economics and Finance (2020, neutral): “5 See, for example, Grinblatt and Keloharju (2001), Barro and McCleary (2003), Guiso, Sapienza, and Zingales (2003, 2004), Hong and Kacperczyk (2009), Hong and Kostovetsky (2012), and Graham et al. (2019).”