BANGKOK: In the Philippines, non-profit and volunteer organizations are a 1.2 billion US dollar industry, with expenditures reaching 1.5 per cent of GDP. They employ five times more people than huge utility companies and have many more employees than in the country’s biggest companies, including the food and beverage giant San Miguel Corp.

In India, an estimated 3.4 per cent of the adult population works in non-profit institutions. In New Delhi, one out of eight adults works in the non-profit sector, according to Ilpo Survo, officer-in-charge of the statistics division of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia-Pacific (ESCAP). These statistics turn on their head the assumption that non-profit work — such as voluntary firefighting and earthquake-recovery to work by environmental and political activists — is welcome and nice but not essential, and thus can easily be done away with.

“This third sector, the non-profit sector, is an enormous economic force. This is a significant, growing force that deserves more attention than is given to it,” Lester Salamon, director of the Centre for Civil Society Studies at John Hopkins University in the United States, said at a recent conference here.

The centre, together with the United Nations Statistics Division, have developed a UN handbook on non-profit institutions in national accounts and is now trying to get countries to generate and report national statistics on the non-profit sector.

“The assumption that the non-profit sector is residual, off to the side, was blown out of the side by the data we got,” Salamon added.

“We didn’t know the contributions were this big until we looked into the figures,” pointed out Prof. Ledivina Carino of the University of the Philippines’ College of Public Administration and Governance.

From countries in western Europe to Asia and Australia, in a mix of developed and developing countries, the non-profit sector contributes a hefty amount to economies by way of ratio to GDP, jobs and output.

If civil society were a national economy, its expenditures would account for 1.6 trillion dollars, making it the fifth largest economy in terms of GDP after the US, Japan, Germany and Britain, figures from the John Hopkins Comparative Non-profit Sector Project show.

Salamon explained that the project, which now has data on the non-profit sector in 37 countries, showed that non-profits account for 47.6 million full-time jobs, provide work for 4.5 per cent of the economically active population and 7.7 per cent of non-agricultural employment.

In these countries, he added, employment in civil society organizations, whether in terms of volunteers or paid staff, accounted for 48 million people — a huge figure compared to the total four million employees of these countries’ largest companies.

These data may well reflect the growing role of non-profit organizations in the delivery of services and are significant as ‘governments realize limits to the welfare state and development (grows) as a focus of national policy’, Salamon said.

In many cases, governments give funds to non-profit organizations to reach groups of people they find hard to reach.

In western European countries like Italy (66.20 per cent) and the Netherlands (85.75 per cent), most of the non-profit activity has been in health and social work, followed by community and social services and then education.

The role of non-profits — and how to get more governments to include them in their national statistics or ‘national accounts’ — was discussed at a conference at the UN centre here, organized by ESCAP, John Hopkins University and the UN Volunteers Programme.

The meeting brought together a mix of activists, researchers and officials from Asian countries’ national statistical offices.

Most countries’ systems of national accounts are confined to tracking figures according to traditional areas like the corporate sector, general government and household sector. —Dawn/Inter-Press News Service