"For example, beliefs in heaven and hell might affect those traits by creating perceived rewards and punishments that relate to `good' and `bad' lifetime behavior."
The data come from six international surveys, including ones by Gallup, the World Bank and researchers at the University of Michigan. They include questions about attendance in places of worship and religious beliefs.
There were four measures of economic development: per capita gross domestic product, educational attainment by adults, urbanization rate and life expectancy.
But the research also showed that at a certain point, increases in church, mosque and synagogue attendance tended to depress economic growth.
Barro, a renowned economist, and McCleary, a lecturer in Harvard's government department, theorized that larger attendance figures could mean that religious institutions were using a disproportionate share of resources.
"It's all been rather surprising," McCleary said. "People didn't believe you could quantify aspects of religion."
Since the German sociologist Max Weber wrote about the Protestant work ethic and the spirit of capitalism, social scientists have argued that culture is part of the complex mix that determines a country's economic health.
What distinguishes the work of Barro and McCleary, some scholars said, is that it uses a sophisticated analysis of a huge set of data to quantify the arguments of anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists.
"They are not the first to look at this, but they are the first to look at this as systemically and as rigorously as they have," said Mark Chaves, a professor of sociology at the University of Arizona in Tucson. "For forever, people have been saying that culture matters in analyzing economies.
"I think this is a new beginning for the rigorous relationship between religion and economic development, " added Chaves, whose forthcoming book examines how religious congregations influence politics and culture. "They've given us a data set and some tools to examine this in a new way."
One of the motivations for undertaking the study, McCleary said, was that empirical research on economic growth typically neglected the influence of religion.
As the couple began its study, McCleary said, it was clear that the widely discussed secularization thesis -- the idea that a country becomes more secular as it becomes richer and more industrialized -- did not apply to the United States, one of the most religious nations in the world.
And over the last 30 years, many East Asian countries, including Malaysia, Singapore and South Korea, have experienced both rapid economic growth and the spread of Christianity, Barro said.
Some of the lowest levels of religiosity were found in China and North Korea. The lowest levels of economic growth were in sub-Saharan African countries. The former East Germany was one of the lowest in both areas.
But one of the major challenges to such research is that countries that vary in their religious beliefs and practices also vary in unrelated ways, said Paola Sapienza, a professor of finance at Northwestern University. "Are you really picking up religion or something that correlates with it, like certain laws or social and economic institutions?" she asked.
Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan who has been conducting the World Values Survey for more than 20 years, noted that many mostly Protestant, wealthy countries were now more interested in quality of life, and that many Eastern countries were now more focused on economic growth.
"Confucian countries are now the most Protestant countries on earth, in terms of a moral imperative to work hard, save money, to do well," Inglehart said.
New York Times
FELICIA R. LEE
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