Purposes
It was to fill this basic gap in knowledge and put the nonprofit sector on the economic map of the world that the project reported on here was undertaken. More specifically, this project sought to:
1) Document the scope, structure, financing, and role of the nonprofit sector for the first time in solid empirical terms in a significant number of countries scattered widely throughout the world;
2) Explain why this sector varies in size from place to place and identify the factors that seem to encourage or retard its development;
3) Evaluate the impact these organizations are having and the contribution they make;
4) Publicize the existence of this set of institutions and increase public awareness of them; and
5) Create local capacity to carry on this work into the future.
Approach
To pursue these objectives, this project adopted an approach that embodies six key features:
A) It is comparative, covering a wide assortment of countries. A first phase of the project, completed in 1994, focused in depth on eight countries(the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Hungary, and Japan).6 The current phase is updating information on many of these original countries and has extended the analysis to more than a dozen more, bringing the total countries covered to 22. At this time, only one, Japan, represents Asia, but other Asian countries, such as India, Pakistan, South Korea, and the Philippines are being currently investigated.
B) It is collaborative. The project was initiated by a team of researchers at the Center for Civil Society Studies in the Johns Hopkins University Institute for Policy Studies in the United States, but it has been carried out with the active collaboration of a team of local associates in the project countries including Japan. Altogether, well over 100 researchers have been involved in the effort.
C) It is consultative, drawing on the assistance of an International Advisory Committee of prominent nonprofit, philanthropic, and business leaders and on local advisory committees in the project countries. In Japan, associates of the NPO Research Forum of Japan have played roles as advisers and consultants.
D) It utilized a common definition and classification system for the nonprofit sector worked out in collaboration with the Local Associates. This definition utilized the five common features identified above as the defining features of the nonprofit sector for purposes of this research.
In particular, they are:
a) Organizations, i.e., they have an institutional presence and structure;
b) Private or non-governmental, i.e., they are institutionally separate from the state;
c) Not profit distributing, i.e., they do not return profits to their managers or to a set of "owners";
d) Self-governing, i.e., they are fundamentally in control of their own affairs;
e) Voluntary, i.e., membership in them is not legally required and they attract some level of voluntary contribution of time or money.
This definition embraces a range of organizations that is a broad range of organizations spanning a wide assortment of fields. Local associates were asked to gather data on all of the types of organizations embraced within this definition, though the inclusion of places of religious worship was made optional in light of the special difficulties of gathering data on religious congregations.
