Luan Vinicius Bernardelli

To understand the factors that contribute to some regions growing and developing more than others is a challenge for social scientists. In this sense, several studies seek to investigate the determinants of growth and economic development processes. In addition to the traditional models, which consider work, fixed capital and human capital, complementary studies acquire cultural factors to analyze this relationship. It is in this context that a religion gains relevance, is one of the factors that most determine a way for societies to organize themselves. The economics of religion, although it was founded in the eighteenth century, was a field of scientific research in World War II, when theories could be tested by statistical techniques. The relevance of this study to Brazil is not that the proportion of the Protestant population has increased by about 250 per cent, while a Catholic proportion has declined by about 27 per cent since 1980. As argued by several authors in the present essays, this alteration was not limited to the religious field, but it caused changes in the political, economic and cultural sector. In this sense, there are several authors who affirm that a greater proportion of the protest has a positive impact in the levels of growth and economic development. It is based on these studies and on the confirmation of the change in the Brazilian religious field, we ask: (i) what is the impact of the increased participation of the Protestant Christian religion on the development process and economic growth in Brazil? Thus, the present essays seek to verify a relation with the levels of growth and economic development. In the first essay an institutional approach was developed, based on seminal studies of the twentieth century, which defend a concept of institutions governed by formal and informal regimes, which leads to interconnection with religious. It was used as a data technique to analyze as mesoregions of Brazil in the years 1991, 2000 and 2010 and, in a complementary way, a spatial approach was applied to verify the spillover effect of cultural-religious. The second was based on the theoretical model of Mankiw, Romer and Weil (1992) and introduced a proxy variable for the Protestant ethic advocated by some authors. Based on the minimally comparable areas of the IPEA, a data technique was used for the State of Paraná in the years 1991, 2000 and 2010. The results of both studies were relevant and complementary, as they show that there was a significant change in the Brazilian religious field, suggesting that this change has contributed substantially to the country's growth and economic development. The issue of the economics of religion is an area that should be widely researched and debated in Brazil, because of its intrinsic importance to economic systems and its ongoing process of change.