Abstract
giving has been widely discussed in economics, including theoretical frame works, empirical analysis and experiments. Taiwan had pretty high charitable donations; moreover, the amount of donations received by religious charities is much higher than nonreligious charity. Chang (2006) used the data from 1999 Taiwan to study the relation between oriental beliefs and donations. In this article, we used the survey data from Academia Sinica for further analysis, and subdivided the East faith, and we had the following results: People with beliefs make more religious and nonreligious donations. In addition, Chinese Buddhism believers have relatively more religious and non-religious donations. Western belief has the highest influence in total charitable giving, and the influence upon religious donations is increasing year by year, but its influence is decreasing in non-religious donations. Folk beliefs, because of its widely cognition, has the lowest influence on religious donations. Besides, price elasticity of non-religious donations is large, while price elasticity of religious donation is smaller. The income effect on the non-religious donations evidently bigger than in religious donations. All in all, because religious endowments has low price elasticity and small income effect, we might indues that religious endowments for people are more like necessities in life. The necessity of religious endowments are higher than non-religious donations, and this is probably because people with lower income were more likely to believe that the after-life consumption spending is more important than now.