Economic Culture and Economic Performance

Key Messages

• This paper explores the effects of several cultural values, attitudes, and the like, on some of the main dimensions of economic performance
• It shows a weak correlation between continental countries’ relative endowment of some cultural attributes and the relative performance of their national economies
• However, not all of the cultural attributes hypothesized to be important were found to matter for performance
• And not all continental countries were under-endowed in some of the cultural attributes that mattered a lot