CIAO DATE: 09/2012
August 2012
Norwegian Institute of International Affairs
This paper investigates the impact of religious denominations on values and attitudes that are thought to be conducive to economic growth and are usually pronounced in favor of Protestants. The model is based on the same strategy as in (Guiso, Sapienza and Zingales 2002). To isolate the effect of religion from other effects, socio-demographic controls such as gender, age, educational and income level and country fixed effects are included in all regressions. The analysis uses the World Values Survey to investigate twelve attitudes in the overall impact of religious denominations followed by the analysis controlling for the dominant religion of the country. The paper contributes to the research by: (1) including more Muslim countries, which leads to different results from that of (Guiso, Sapienza and Zingales 2002) where Muslims represented mostly minority religion in researched countries; (2) evaluating precisely the differences between Protestants and other religious denominations. The results thus are not dependent on such an unspecified group of people who answered that they do not belong to any religious denomination; (3) including new attitudes like determination or confidence in major companies that are emphasized especially in (Kuran 2011). The results show that neither overall analysis nor analysis with the control for dominant religion proved the hypothesis that Protestants have significantly higher values and attitudes considered advantageous for economic development compared to other religious denominations. Is it because of the changes of values and attitudes over time?