According to researchers at Harvard, the religiosity of a country is a good predictor of it’s economic growth. The New York Times story is here.
This entry on SSRN appears to be their working paper (though the emphasis is different from the angle of the NYTimes story).
Actually, the study found that the belief in the existence of hell positively affected economic growth. Church attendance had a negative effect on growth, which led the researchers to conclude that too much church attendance was an overinvestment of time and resources to the cultivation of economically-necessary beliefs.
If you’d like to read more of my take on that piece, I wrote about it on my blog last month.
http://www.braydenking.com/weblog/archives/000038.html
Did they break it down between major religions? That would be interesting…