Amazon.com is one of the few U.S. businesses in good financial shape, but is that good news for charities?

In Slate magazine, Paul Collins, a writing teacher at Portland State University, writes that Amazon is notoriously quiet — or stingy — about its corporate philanthropy.

He suggests two possible scenarios.

“The first is that Amazon.com is exceedingly discreet — that it changes into superhero tights in a phone booth, then rockets off to provide clean water to poor villages, dole out blankets to shivering orphans, and phone in whopping anonymous grants during Car Talk pledge drives,” he writes. “The other is that there are lemonade stands that donate more to charity than Amazon.com does.”

Mr. Collins goes on to explore whether Amazon.com’s giving should concern consumers.

To be sure, the online retailer uses its technology to raise money for charities. In 2001, for...

Aid experts are debating a new book that argues that Americans and others have an ethical obligation to give money to fight global poverty.

The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, by Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton University, compares the moral imperative to give to saving the life of a child drowning in a pond. “The fact that we would get wet, or ruin a good pair of shoes, doesn’t really count when it comes to saving a child’s life,” he writes on his Web site.

Mr. Singer has started an online pledge that people can sign to dedicate a portion of their income to charity.

In The Wall Street Journal, William Easterly, an economics professor at New York University, questions Mr. Singer’s thesis. While the author makes a compelling argument, he ignores the bureaucracy and inefficiency in many international aid efforts, Mr. Easterly says.

Holden...

As American fund raisers debate the Obama administration’s plan to limit the charitable tax deductions for the wealthy, a vastly different tax proposal is roiling the United Kingdom.

The Fortune Forum, an organization that puts together an annual meeting in London of philanthropists and celebrities to promote giving, started an advocacy campaign this week to have the government provide lucrative tax breaks to rich people and companies that donate to help the world’s poor.

Specifically, the proposal would allow 50 percent tax relief on contributions that support the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, a set of antipoverty and social goals, reports The Guardian, a British newspaper.

The forum said its plan, which was crafted by James Mirrlees, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, would spur an additional $7-billion a year for charity.

The proposal appears to have divided ...

The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a foundation watchdog group, is drawing fire from an unlikely source: a donor.

This week the committee, in Washington, released a set of benchmarks for good grant making, including one that urges foundations to give at least half of their grant dollars to help the poor, minorities, people with disabilities, and other “marginalized communities.”

Paul Brest, president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which has given grants to the committee in the past, praises the watchdog’s mission to improve the effectiveness of philanthropies and focus their giving on disadvantaged people, but the new recommendations are a poor prescription for foundations.

“Even for someone who shares NCRP’s concerns about marginalized communities, its hierarchy of ends is breathtakingly arrogant,” he writes on The Huffington Post.

The National ...

A closely watched fight about the future of the public school system in the District of Columbia.continues to raise questions about the role foundations should play in assisting education.

Several anonymous foundations have pledged $200-million to help D.C. schools. But the money is contingent upon the district’s superintendent, Michelle A. Rhee, hammering out a labor agreement with the teachers union that gives the city the ability to reward high-performing individual teachers with increased pay and to quickly remove underperforming ones.

The Washington Teachers’ Union has said it is uneasy with the foundations’ involvement, saying teachers’ pay should not depend on philanthropic money. Half of the money committed by the donors would support salaries, while the rest would pay for teacher training and other efforts.

This week The Washington Post reported that Ms. Rhee said a...

While the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has plenty of critics, its efforts to help farmers in Africa seems to be getting more hits than a boxer on fight night.

The Oakland Institute, a left-leaning think tank in California, this week released a report highly critical of the Gates-led Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, or AGRA. While the Community Alliance for Global Justice, a grass-roots group in Seattle, formed AGRA Watch, which, like other critics, “demands that the Gates foundation be more transparent in its endorsements of policies and more accountable to its stated goals.”

What’s more, a $23-million Gates grant to the World Cocoa Foundation is under fire from the International Labor Rights Forum, which says that chocolate companies associated with the effort have not fulfilled agreements to reduce child labor.

According to The Seattle Times, the Gates foundation...

While both Russia and China want to promote philanthropy within their borders, Russian efforts are hampered by unethical charities and a testy relationship between the government and nonprofit groups, writes Ken Berger, president of Charity Navigator.

Mr. Berger recently attended conferences in Moscow and Beijing to discuss how the two countries can develop nonprofit regulations and bolster charitable giving.

On his blog, Ken’s Commentary, he writes of a big disparity in the events. “Whereas China seems to be taking steps forward (albeit still in the early stages), Russia is still at the starting gate. In China, they are talking about how to give, in Russia they are talking about the idea of giving,” he writes.

In Russia, since “there is so little regulation, there are no clear guidelines on what can and cannot be done. Therefore, some people have created charities as their own...

The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a foundation watchdog group, will push grant makers to give more money to help poor neighborhoods and minorities as part of a series of recommendations to improve philanthropy.

The Washington organization plans to hold a news conference Tuesday morning to unveil the recommendations, which are already stirring up controversy in the nonprofit world.

According to a draft copy of the watchdog’s “Criteria for Philanthropy at its Best,” it will urge foundations to give at least 50 percent of their grant dollars to benefit “lower-income communities, communities of color, and other marginalized groups, broadly defined.”

The organization says that 1 out of every 3 grant dollars supports such people and neighborhoods.

The group will also encourage philanthropies to provide more money to pay for charities’ operating expenses and to give...

The alleged fraud perpetrated by the money manager Bernard Madoff devastated many Jewish nonprofit organizations. But according to at least one observer, the damage was largely self-inflicted.

“The real Madoff scandal isn’t the losses; it’s that our community was sitting on vast pools of accumulated wealth, much of it used to little effect,” writes Noam Neusner, a former speech writer for President George W. Bush. “Madoff had his secrets to keep, but so, in fact, did many foundations and endowments. They had money to spend, and they didn’t spend it. Now it’s gone.”

In an opinion article in The Forward, a Jewish newspaper based in New York, Mr. Neusner says that given the problems facing Judaism, Jewish foundations and charities should have dipped into their endowments more frequently to make grants or expand charitable programs.

“If Jewish donors were truly ambitious, they would ...

President Obama’s proposal to limit charitable tax deductions for wealthy people is roiling the nonprofit world.

To no surprise, right-leaning blogs are attacking the plan with vitriol. One writer calls it a “war on charity,” and another says the administration is trying to hurt churches and conservative think tanks.

Political charges aside, Charity Navigator, a nonprofit watchdog, is asking how many donors are motivated to make gifts in part because of the tax benefits.

“The data that we have seen over the years has shown a big spike in donations through our site during the last several days of the year, especially on December 31 which of course is the last day to make a qualified tax deductible charitable contribution,” it says on its blog. “This data indicates to us that the tax benefits really do motivate people to donate.”

But John D. Colombo, a law professor at the...