Shadow Economy Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

However much we appreciate the enormous scientific contribution by Professor Ronald Inglehart, who initiated the international data collection of the World Values Survey, our re-analysis of the very World Values Survey data [“roll-outs” of the World Values Survey data wvs1981_2008_v20090914.sav] brought us to question Inglehart’s theories, with which he and his associates interpret the mass of the World Values Survey data. Their theoretical approach does not use a sufficiently number of hard-core indicators how global publics view central issues of economic policy, and their theories overemphasize a secularistic view of the religious phenomenon in modern society. Their theories predict the gradual waning of the religious phenomena in parallel with the increase of human security, and even cherish at times the tendencies brought about by such a waning of the religious element in advanced democracies. Inglehart spells them out: higher levels of tolerance for abortion, divorce, homosexuality; the erosion of parental authority, the decrease of the importance of family life et cetera. Is that really something to cherish?

Today, societal and economic development is discontinuous; regional centers of the world economy shift at an enormous speed; and above all, religion and family values can be an important assett in the stability of capitalist development. Economic growth inexorably shifts away from the North Atlantic arena towards new centers of gravitation of the world economy. Alberto Alesina’s and Paola Giuliano’s new maps of global values (Alesina and Giuliano, 2013) present a real break with the hitherto existing secularistic consensus of global value research. Their maps of family ties, respect for parents et cetera coincide with the global map of economic growth today.

Leading representatives of the global economics profession now start to take up the challenge to interpret the mass of the data from the World Values Survey project on their own. The essay by Barro and McCleary (2003) was an important beginning and a good example of how today economic research uses data from the World Values Survey project to study the relationship between religion, denominations and economic growth.

Alesina (2013); Alesina and Angeletos (2005); Alesina and Fuchs-Schündeln (2007); Alesina and Guiliano (2010, 2011, 2013); Alesina, Cozzi and Mantovan (2012); and Alesina, di Tella, and MacCulloch (2004) all show how the economic discipline can gain hard-core, quantitative and valuable insights from comparative knowledge about such phenomena as generalized trust and social capital, individualism, family ties, morality, attitudes toward work and perception of poverty, and religious practice for economic processes.

In our re-analysis, we use the advanced statistical multivariate analysis technique of the Promax factor analysis, which allows for correlations between factors. It is available to the global public via the IBM-SPSS statistical package XXI. We eliminated missing values by listwise delition.

In our first re-analysis, there were 92289 interview partners from around the globe with complete data for all the 30 variables of our research design. Our main model explains 47.89% of the total variance of all the 30 variables. We highlight the relationships between the original 30 variables and the newly derived factor analytical dimensions:

a) economic permissiveness
b) traditional religion
c) racism
d) higher education for the younger generation (education gap between the generations)
e) distrust of the army and the press
f) authoritarian character
g) tolerance and respect
h) the 'ego' company (i. e. the rejection of obedience and unselfishness as values in education)
i) [predominantly] female rejection of the market economy and democracy

We also look at the trajectory of global society by analyzing the factor scores along the path of the Human Development Indicator of the UNDP (“human security indicator”, also used by Inglehart and his associates).

 Economic permissiveness clearly captures the dimension of lawlessness, moral-ethical decay and the shadow economy, so prominent in contemporary economic theory of growth. In statistical terms, it is the most important of all the resulting factors.

 Traditional religion is linked in a very complex way to the absence of economic permissiveness. We also look at the exceptional performers (“residuals”) which best avoided economic permissiveness on each stage of secularization.

We also present Chropleth maps of human values across the globe, and show the regional implications of our analysis.

JEL Classification: A13; Z12; P48; O017; N3

Keywords: Relation of Economics to Social Values; religion; other Economic Systems: Political Economy; Legal Institutions; Property Rights, Formal and Informal Sectors, Shadow Economy, Institutional Arrangements; Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy