You can represent 5% of your Nation’s GDP

By peter | Permalink | No Comments | October 1st, 2007 | Trackback

Empirical data ruled last week as the United Nations, with Johns Hopkins University, took a close look at volunteerism and volunteer-travel at a conference in Bonn, Germany.

The meeting saw the release of the long-titled but relatively succinct document, “Measuring Civil Society and Volunteering: Initial Findings from Implementation of the UN Handbook on Nonprofit Institutions,” which presents the economic data collected by eight countries since 2003.

The study called the impact of volunteers “much larger than previously understood” and found that volunteering has become a significant economic force, contributing 5% of a nation’s Gross Domestic Product on average. This amounts to more than most Nation’s utilities industries and as much as the construction industries.

And volunteering keeps catching on. Non-profit industry in the selected countries grew at a rate of 8.1 % a year, while overall growth in GDP for each country lagged behind at an average of 4.1% each year.

Volunteers most seriously affected the health, education and social services sectors, in Belgium even contributing “66.2 % of value added in the social services field.”

In 2003, the UN Handbook of Nonprofit Institutions updated their definition of “non-profits” and implemented a more specific way of recording economic data about those organizations. The changes allowed John Hopkins University researchers to analyze data submitted from Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Japan, New Zealand, and the United States to issue this report, the findings of which may bring increased attention to volunteer-travel as an economic force in many regions.

The report is incomplete, data on certain countries was unavailable in several key areas that may have affected overall statistics, but the general trend in the volunteering world is that more and more people are donating time and energy for the benefit of others each year. The impact has been such that the United Nations now feels the need to record, report and incorporate the influence of volunteers into worldwide planning and policies.

The full report—complete with excessive amounts of bar graphs and pie charts—is available for pdf download here.

John Hopkins writing about itself.

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