"Meanwhile everyone agrees Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are among the "developed" states and I don't think it's fair to characterize them as Christian."

This is just a nitpick as I agree with your overall point, but South Korea isn't agreed by everyone to be a developed country. In fact, they are right on the cusp as evidenced by the fact that some investment funds consider them developing and some consider them developed.

I almost think there should be a classification for the US, Japan, and the UK, and another for "everyone else". If you look at the number of medium to smallish companies that have access to public stock markets, there is a huge difference between those three countries and everywhere else. Something is fundamentally different about their economies. And I've never read where someone declares this a mystery worthy of investigation and tries to explain it.