new characteristics of inequalities in the information society and ...

ISSN: 2247-6172;
ISSN-L: 2247-6172
Review of Applied Socio- Economic Research
(Volume 5, Issue 1/ 2013), pp. 21
URL: http://www.reaser.eu
e-mail: editors@reaser.eu
H.2 In a collectivity sufficiently developed, modern values thoroughly permeate religion so that
they may:
- either reinforce the positive and relatively higher influence of less traditional religions with
respect to conservative religions on children’s educational achievements;
- or counterbalance the curbing though positive influence of more traditional religions to
such an extent as to improve children’s educational achievements.
H.3 When the development level is not sufficiently high, traditional values prevail and can
further curtail the curbing effect of a conservative religion on children’s educational achievements.
These hypotheses are verified through the empirical model that is specified in the subsequent
part.
3. Data and empirical framework
For the empirical part we have selected a sample of 1,684 individuals from the 2005 World
Value Survey (WVS) dataset related to some Latin American countries, nominally Argentina,
Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay. The reason why these countries
were chosen is that they present high heterogeneity in the data with respect to the more relevant
variables – education, religion and development indicators – used in the empirical analysis. The
WVS mainly reports people’s values and beliefs and also their religious affiliation.
In Table 1 there are the descriptive statistics, in particular, our dependent variable (Ed)
concerns the individuals who have achieved either a university degree or some level of university
education. The individuals with university education represent 26% of our sample. As far as
religious affiliation is concerned, we distinguish between Catholics representing 93% of the sample
and Protestants representing the remaining part. This allows testing the above hypotheses and, in
particular, verifying whether the former have a stronger conservative dimension than the latter. As
to this distinction, we take into account that in Latin America Protestantism grew very slowly
starting from the grassroots during the nineteenth century and more rapidly during the following
century. More than Catholics, Protestants have been able to consider modernization as a process
leading to people’s empowerment and greater adaptability to the new system. This has helped the
integration of lower classes into Latin American industrial societies (Escobar, 1997).
As belonging to a religious denomination does not necessarily embody individual religiosity,
we also consider the Catholics and Protestants who define themselves as religious persons
independently of going to church or not (Catholic*Religious). As to the other independent
variables, males represent 46%, the mean age is 21.33 and leisure is important in one’s own life for
29% of the individuals considered. Given the characteristics of the WVS dataset, family
educational background is captured by the chief wage earner profession/job expressed by fourteen
dummies (see the empirical appendix). The geographical variation in human capital accumulation
is taken into account through country dummies. Finally, as to the development level promoting
modern values, our approach is in line with the contribution of Inglehart and Baker (2000). We