between Muslims and Hindus and fertility rates among Indian Muslims are
falling rapidly. It is the wider economic and social drivers of fertility that differ
systematically between Muslims and Hindus. Muslims are more urbanized
than Hindus, but within urban areas Muslims disproportionately occupy
poorer housing areas with lower levels of public health infrastructure and
lower-paid jobs than Hindus. Muslim girls have lower levels of education than
Hindu girls (Jeffrey and Jeffrey, 2002; James and Nair, 2005). Accounting for
these differences shows that the socio-economic effects of child and female
education, poverty, employment, urbanization, and land ownership account for
the bulk of the difference in fertility levels between Hindus and Muslims. But
a fertility differential still remains after these variables have been taken into
account. This differential has been labelled a ‘cultural impact’ by demogra-
phers (Jeffrey and Jeffrey, 2002).
What is culture?
How then do we measure culture? Economists first tried to avoid the question
and notmeasure it,arguing that if all the economic factors impacting some-
thing are measured and quantified, then anything that remains unexplained
represents a cultural effect. However, things are improving: scholars are re-
engaging with culture. Some have used ingenious statistics, such as the power
of sixteenth-century German princes to influence the religious denomination
of their subjects, or how religion was associated with changing city sizes in
Europe after the fourteenth century. Others have turned to long-run survey
data. The World Values Survey, in the words of its own website, is a ‘global
research project that explores people’s values and beliefs, their stability or
change over time and their impact on social and political development of the
societies in different countries of the world’.
Guiso et al.define culture as ‘those customary beliefs and values that
ethnic,religious,and social groups transmit fairly unchanged from generation
to generation’ (2006:23). This definition focuses on prior beliefs and values
and ignores those that are acquired during a person’s life. But how do we disen-
tangle those values that are acquired in later life from economic changes that
are occurring at the same time and distinguish cause and effect between culture
and economics? Some scholars have used ethnicity, race or family history as
proxy measures for culture, as they are (relatively) fixed factors which may be
correlated with other beliefs and values. For example, many have argued that
Protestants are more individualistic than others. But these measures are
inevitably very crude. Even within a group with clear rules of membership
such as ‘Catholic’, the stated belief structure of members runs all the way from
‘the ultra-conservative Opus Dei movement to left-wing liberation theology
movements’(Chang,2007). The world’s major religions have evolved over
many centuries, such that they can all now be interpreted in ways that are both
good and bad for economic development. Hinduism, some argue, values those
252 Patterns and Determinants of Economic Growth