The expansion of both private donations and volunteering will also be important for the future of Japan's nonprofit sector. As has been shown in this chapter, Japan has low levels of private donations and volunteering in comparison with other developed countries. The aging population in Japan may represent a large reservoir of potential volunteers and donations that remain yet "untapped" for the expansion of the philanthropic share of nonprofit operations. However, in order to tap this potential reservoir, the tax system must be drastically reformed to reward charitable donations and volunteering more generously.
These and other changes are very much "in the wind" in Japan. The next few years will determine whether they settle down to earth.
Naoto Yamauchi**
Osaka School of International Public Policy
Osaka University
December 2000
Notes
1 For further detail on the derivation of this "structural-operational definition" of the nonprofit sector, see Salamon and Anheier (1997).
2 See Salamon (1994).
3 Among OECD countries only Japan, Germany, Great Britain, Portugal, Sweden, Finland, and Austria estimate NPIs as an independent category. (see OECD, 1995)
4 See Anheier, Rudney and Salamon (1992) for details. For example there are problems such as, under SNA, NPOs that rely on governments for over half of their revenues are classified as the general government sector. France is an extreme example of this. France follows the United Nations manual very literally, making the interpretation of the nonprofit sector extremely narrow. As a result, the ratio of nonprofit organizations serving households to GDP is reported to be less than 0.3%, and the nonprofit sector is estimated to be extremely small.
5 In the new SNA estimate guidelines released in 1993, nonprofit institutions were divided into market NPI which sold services in the market, and non-market NPIs which did not. The former group were regarded as part of for-profit enterprises (from United Nations et. al., 1993).
6 For a summary of the results of Phase I of project work, see: Lester M. Salamon and Helmut K. Anheier, The Emerging Sector: An Overview. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Institute for Policy Studies, 1994), republished as The Emerging Nonprofit Sector, Vol.1 in the Johns Hopkins Nonprofit Sector Series. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996). More detailed results are available in a series of books published in the Johns Hopkins Nonprofit Sector Series by Manchester University Press. For detailed Phase I results for Japan, see Yamamoto ed. (1998).
7 Technically, the more precise comparison is between nonprofit contribution to "value added" and gross domestic product. For the nonprofit sector, "value added" in economic terms essentially equals the sum of wages and the imputed value of volunteer time. On this basis, the nonprofit sector in Japan accounted for 2.7 percent of total value added.
