Date of Award

6-2010

Document Type

Union College Only

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Economics

First Advisor

Eshragh Motahar

Language

English

Keywords

religion, growth, economic, relationship, capital

Abstract

Religion and economics until recently were not considered by most to share a relationship. However, the economies of nations are intertwined in institutions, both economic and non-economic. Religion is one such non-economic institution that shares a relationship with the economy, which experts have recently realized, should no longer be ignored. Through the use of cross-sectional data gathered primarily from World Values Survey and Penn World, this paper investigates this relationship between religion and economic growth. It looks particularly at how religion affects economic growth by assessing the effect of religion on one of the channels (human capital) through which growth is directly affected. In addition, this study also assess whether one world religion is more suited for economic growth than others. This paper finds that both religious belief and religious belonging have a positive relationship with growth. This positive relationship that religion shares with growth is determined to not be as a result of the channel of human capital; religion was found to have a negative correlation with human capital. The study also finds that Protestantism is the “best” religion with regard to growth. These results give great insight into how exactly religion affects economic growth.

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