A new report has found nonprofits are now major employers in many countries, making up an average of 7.4 percent of the workforce — including volunteer workers — in 16 nations.
That number reaches more than 10 percent of the workforce for advanced economies like the United States, according to the report from Johns Hopkins University Center for Civil Society Studies.
“The State of Global Civil Society and Volunteering” report also found that nonprofit organizations accounted for around 4.5 percent of GDP on average. This makes the nonprofit sector not only a major employer for countries around the world, but also a key contributor to the economy and an influence on many fields.
Official data on nonprofits is often lacking, however. The report notes that a “global associational revolution” has been underway around the world for decades now, with many nonprofits and aid organizations springing up. But countries often fail to keep good data on nonprofits. The Johns Hopkins Center, together with the United Nations Statistics Division, collected data on these 16 countries to help remedy that problem.
The results show a sector with a growing presence. In the eight countries with historical data, the growth rate of the nonprofit sector’s contribution to GDP exceeded the growth rate of GDP. On average, nonprofits in the 16 countries surveyed hired more workers than either transportation or construction industries. And despite the assumption that most nonprofits run solely on donations, the report found only about 23 percent of revenue is from philanthropic giving. Instead, about 43 percent comes from fees paid for nonprofit services, and 32 percent comes from government sources.
As for those nonprofits’ activities, the vast majority — about 75 percent — of those countries’ nonprofit gross value added (GVA) came from organizations that engage in services such as housing, education and health care, as opposed to “expressive” services like arts or sports.
As nonprofits continue to grow, businesses and universities are moving to adjust. Accounting firms such as Burr Pilger Mayer are offering Nonprofit Education Series to teach executives and accountants how to manage nonprofit payroll and taxes, topics that now occupy a large role in university programs as well.
Yale, Stanford, Harvard, Berkeley and many other top business schools now offer nonprofit management programs, many with specialties in certain fields, such as environmentalism or education. Nonprofit recruitment has also shifted toward more experienced leadership, sometimes with headhunting in the for-profit sector.
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