September 25, 2007
Eight-Country Study Tallies Nonprofit Groups' Economic Impact
By Suzanne Perry
Nonprofit organizations contribute an average of 5 percent to the gross domestic product in eight major countries, according to a new statistical analysis — a level much higher than previously recorded.
“The economic scale of nonprofit institutions outdistances that of major industries,” says a report released today by the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civil Society Studies. The university analyzed data from countries that were the first to implement new United Nations guidelines for collecting statistics on nonprofit activities.
It found that such activities contribute a high of 7.3 percent to the gross domestic product in Canada, compared with a low of 1.3 percent in the Czech Republic. Even with the low figure for the Czech Republic, the average contribution in the eight countries exceeds that of the utilities industry and is roughly the same as that of the construction and finance industries, the report says.
Data were also collected for the United States (7.2 percent), Japan (5.2 percent), Belgium (5 percent), New Zealand (4.9 percent), Australia (4.7 percent), and France (4.2 percent). The figures cover a single year for each country, but range from 1999 to 2004.
Johns Hopkins worked with the United Nations Statistics Division to develop the new guidelines, issued in 2003, because the System of National Accounts, which countries use to report economic data, assigns some nonprofit groups to corporate or government categories based on their revenue sourcesthus giving an incomplete picture of the nonprofit world’s total economic contribution. It also fails to account for volunteer work.
Data collected under the new system for six of the countries (all but Australia and the United States) show that nonprofit institutions contribute on average 403 percent more to gross domestic product than is reflected in the “nonprofit” category of the System for National Accounts, the report says.
The economic contribution of nonprofit groups is also growing faster than the general economy in the five countries for which historical data were available (Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Japan, and the United States) — an average of 8.1 percent, compared with an average of 4.1 percent.
The report, “Measuring Civil Society and Volunteering: Initial Findings from Implementation of the U.N. Handbook on Nonprofit Institutions,” is available free on the Center for Civil Society Studies Web site.
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