Putting the non-profit sector and volunteering on the economic map.

• Author: Leigh, Robert
• Position: The Chronicle INTERVIEW - Interview

LESTER M. SALAMON is a professor at The Johns Hopkins University and Director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies. As a pioneer in the empirical study of the non-profit sector in the United States and more recently throughout the world, his 1982 book, The Federal Budget and the Nonprofit Sector, was the first to document the scale of the American non-profit sector and the extent of government support to it. Mr. Salamon has extended this analysis to the international sphere, producing the first comparative empirical assessment ever undertaken of the size, structure, financing and role of the non-profit sector at the global level. The initial results of this work were published in his 1994 book, The Emerging Sector, and in two subsequent volumes of Global Civil Society. Based on this work, Mr. Salamon led the team that helped the United Nations Statistics Division prepare the new UN Handbook on Nonprofit Institutions in the System of National Accounts (NPI Handbook).

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Mr. Salamon spoke with Robert Leigh of the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) Programme.

The Johns Hopkins Center and the UN Statistics Division have partnered to develop the first NPI Handbook. What prompted this partnership and what is the goal of the NPI Handbook?

The goal of the NPI Handbook is to bring non-profit organizations and volunteering out of the shadows to which they have been consigned in official economic statistics. Under the System of National Accounts, which guides the collection and reporting of economic data around the world, these organizations are allocated among different economic sectors based on their principal source of income. Since fees and government support are the major sources of non-profit revenue in most countries, the majority of the economic activity of non-profits gets lumped together in existing statistics with that of corporations or Governments. In addition, the official statistics do not capture volunteer labour at all. As a result, the non-profits and volunteering are largely invisible in existing economic statistics, making it virtually impossible to gain a true understanding of the scope and scale of this increasingly important set of organizations and the volunteer effort that helps to support their work.

The NPI Handbook was developed to overcome this problem and provide a more accurate view of the economic and social importance of the non-profit sector and volunteering. The UN Statistics Division agreed to partner with us in its development after we presented evidence from research work we had with local partners in more than 30 countries around the world--from Argentina to Australia, from France to the Philippines. This work demonstrated what many people already suspected: that non-profit organizations and volunteering constitute a massive economic force, making far more significant contributions to the solution of public problems than existing official statistics suggest. In response, the Statistics Division agreed to organize an experts committee to consider how to capture non-profit institutions and...