A recent publication by the St. Louis Fed notes the relationship between the belief in hell and economic growth.
According to the secularization hypothesis, as a country’s inhabitants become richer and more educated, their faith in religion and religious institutions wanes, and they attend church less regularly. Economists Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote find some support for this hypothesis. They wrote in 2002 that increased education results in a decrease in the extent of religious beliefs, perhaps because public school systems tend to reinforce secular education that, the economists argue, conflicts with traditional religious beliefs.
By contrast, ...economist Laurence Iannaccone wrote in 1998 that church attendance rises with education, which suggests that rich Western countries should have higher rates of church attendance. Ultimately, then, the issue is whether religious beliefs, as Weber and Smith argued, can be shown to have an effect on a country’s economic growth.
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What we also see from the graph is that the greater the belief in hell (religious beliefs), the less corrupt a country’s public and private institutions tend to be perceived; this perception, in turn, can affect economic growth.
