In the 1980s the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) commissioned a study under a famous economic historian Angus Maddison. His monumental research  has shown that between years 1 and 1700 AD, India’s Hindu economy accounted for a quarter to one-third of the total world GDP, but began to decline sharply under foreign rule till in the 1950s their share of world GDP came down to 3 percent. 

Pew Research on religious groups and Wall Street Journal reports that Hindus are  the best educated religious group in the U.S – 77% of American Hindus have a college degree, compared with an average of 27% for all U.S. adults. Hindus are the highest earning community in the US and highest tax paying community in many countries around the world. 

Hindu economic principles – which promote abundance in both the inner and outer worlds and have been proven to create wealthy communities for many millennia – continue to be relevant in the modern world, thus disproving the limited views of economist and socialists such as Weber, Schweitzer and Kapp.

Many core principles of a Hindu economy are outlined as early as in the Rig Veda (X.117.4) and various Upanishads. Subsequently, there were several sources of economic ideas in Hindu texts: Kautilya’s Arthashastra (320 BC), Shura-Neetisaara, Dharmashaastras and other manuscripts penned by Apastambha, Vasistha, Yaajnavalkya and others [1], addressed sophisticated economic principles such as labor theory, supply-demand principles, and scarcity theory of value, among others.