Analysis of the Influence of the Protestant Religion on the Economic Growth of German Reich (1879–1910)

Abstract

Despite many previous studies, the author has applied econometric analysis to verify the validity of the Weber's thesis on the positive impact of the Protestant religion on economic growth presented in "The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism". To this end, gross GDP of German Reich in 1879-1910 was analyzed. According to the results of multiple regression analysis (least-square method), the Protestant religion, in addition to the level of emigration and the percentage of people working in agriculture, played a significant part in the creation of social welfare (the gross domestic product GDP) in Germany. However, it is a negative dependence as the increase in the number of Protestants by 1% led to a decline in GDP growth of Germany by 6.146% and thus the hypothesis was not supported. The determination coefficient was 33.13%, which only proves that there were other factors that influenced the social welfare of Germany which were not included in the model. A surprising finding was the lack of relevance of the variable of the percentage of pupils and students.