国際会議(英文)
第1セッション
Japanese Nonprofit Sector from a Comparative Perspective*
Naoto Yamauchi
I. Introduction
Recently there has been a tremendous surge of interest in the broad range of social institutions that operate outside the market and the state in Japan and elsewhere in the world. Known variously as "nonprofit," "non-governmental," "civil society," or "third sector" organizations, this set of institutions includes within it a sometimes bewildering array of entities―hospitals, universities, social clubs, professional organizations, day care centers, hobby clubs, environmental groups, family counseling agencies, sports clubs, job training centers, human fights organizations, and many more. Despite their diversity, these entities share a number of common features that make it reasonable to consider them a single economic "sector."1
Such organizations have long functioned as providers of education and social care in developed and developing societies alike, but they have grown in importance over the past several decades as funding and other limitations have reduced the capabilities of the state to cope on its own with the social welfare, development, and environmental challenges of our time, and as citizens have sought to take a more direct part in social problem-solving and public affairs. The result has been a global "associational revolution,"2 a striking upsurge of organized private voluntary activity in virtually every part of the world-in the traditional welfare states of North America and Western Europe, in the Central and Eastern Europe, and throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
In Japan, in particular, it is clear that the catalyst for this change was the Great Hanshin Earthquake (Kobe Earthquake) which hit the Metropolitan area between Kobe and Osaka in January 1995. In addition to the donation of 170 billion yen, around one million volunteers and countless voluntary nonprofit organizations rallied forth as a result of this disaster. Since then, various types of nonprofit activities have gained a great deal of attention among ordinary citizens, as well as policymakers and researchers.
Despite the growing importance of this set of institutions, however, little is known about them in solid empirical terms, both in Japan and elsewhere in the world. As a consequence, it has been difficult to attract serious attention to them, to gauge their capabilities to shoulder the new responsibilities being put on them, or to determine what might be needed to improve their operations and role.
In this paper I will review the overall economic structure and current state of the Japanese private nonprofit sector through quantitative data, including the overall scale of activities, the structure of the industry and its funding sources. In the Section II, I will provide an outline how the nonprofit sector is treated in the System of National Accounts, or SNA, which is a representative set of macro-level statistics. Then in Section III, I will highlight the findings of Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project. Finally Section IV is reserved for conclusions and implications.
II. Nonprofit Organizations in the System of National Accounts
1. How does SNA treat nonprofit activities?
One set of macro level data (or aggregated data) on the economic activities of nonprofits is the System of National Accounts, or SNA. Under the SNA nonprofit organizations are listed as Nonprofit Institutions (hereafter shown as NPI).
