Bangkok, October 6:

In the Philippines, non-profit and volunteer organisations are a $1.2 billion industry, with expenditures reaching 1.5 per cent of gross domestic product (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, US, said. 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, making it the fifth largest economy in terms of GDP after the United States, Japan, Germany and Britain, figures from the John Hopkins Comparative Non-profit Sector Project show.