Satellite Account on Nonprofit and Related Institutions and Volunteer Work

2.1 CNP Statistical System Adopted by UN Statistics Division

A second important objective of the CNP, and maybe even more so of the new handbook, was to build the capacity to continue and institutionalize the much-needed work in the future. Many of the national research teams involved in the CNP produced only one or two rounds of data for their countries. Most of the involved researchers have subsequently moved on to other scholarly tasks. Consequently, what may be CNP’s greatest accomplishment and success is that the United Nations in 2003 ratified CNP’s statistical system in the “Handbook on Non-Profit Institutions in the System of National Accounts”. The handbook explicitly called on national statistical agencies, instead of research teams, to create satellite accounts documenting and measuring the size and scope of civil society.

Maybe more important than the handbook itself was that the United Nations Statistics Division recommended that national statistics agencies create satellite accounts for nonprofit institutions. This made it easier to argue that national statistical agencies around the world should start recording and measuring nonprofits. With officially authorized statistics, the visibility and legitimacy of civil society rose. At the same time, systematic, comparative data is highly valuable for policy makers, researchers and sector leaders.

The large revision of the SNA 2008 incorporated the idea of satellite accounts and put more pressure on national statistics offices to implement the ideas and practices since the collective authority of the SNA is the UN Statistics Division, the OECD, the European Commission, the World Bank and the IMF (the International Monetary Fund). According to the CNP, governments in thirty-three countries have to date committed to the implementation of the handbook and 27 statistical agencies have either completed or are working on at least one satellite account.

3.1 An Increasing Need for Reliable and More Knowledge

As civil society and its organizations continue to expand in size and importance all over the world (Salamon, Sokolowski, and Haddock 2017), the interest from policymakers, social scientists and statisticians keeps growing and the need for good international comparative data on civil society organizations is larger than ever when transnational organizations as the EU, the UN and the OECD emphasize the value of civil society, for example in the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. There is also a growing interest in concepts such as “the social economy”, “social entrepreneurship” and “social enterprises” (cf. Young, Searing, and Brewer 2016) which the previous handbook did not capture. With time, it is even more evident that it is important to measure and value volunteer work.

Consequently, something should be done. Once again some of the key researchers involved in the CNP teamed up with the UN Statistics Division to produce a new and updated handbook. As a growing number of countries had joined the project and created data, substantial legal and semantic differences among the involved countries was evident. This had to be taken into account in the development of an updated handbook.

4.1 The Definition and Conceptualization of Civil Society

The institutions considered in-scope for the handbook must be: (1) private, i. e. not controlled by government; (2) serving a social or public purpose, rather than to maximize and distribute returns to owners; and (3) voluntary, without compulsion. The major difference compared to the old handbook is that the strict nonprofit-distribution constraint is replaced with a limited profit-distribution constraint. The organizations in question may distribute some of their economic surplus in the form of profits, but this cannot be their main purpose.

The constraints on profit distribution can be set by law, by the organizations’ own governing documents or by a set of rigid social customs. The new limited profit-distribution constraint can also be met through activities significantly reducing the amount of profits earned. This criterion could be met if the organization’s social mission is to subsidize products or services for needy groups or if part of its social mission is to employ people who are less productive due to disabilities. For an organization to be considered as a civil society organization, the constraints of profit distribution or profit earning should be at least fifty percent.

With the previous handbook it was often tricky for statistical agencies to identify organizations that were non-profit distributing. The limited profit-distribution constraint introduced in the new handbook will only increase this challenge. The handbook seeks to solve the problem of determining this and other difficult delimitation problems with a set of decision trees. This is educationally good and makes the definitions clearer. It becomes quite easy to decide if a given organization should be defined as in civil society. That is, if you know the organization well enough.

The main problem for a statistical agency is that their employees do not have the necessary depth of knowledge of all organizations in the economy. Fortunately, the handbook provides a way out of this potential conundrum. It suggests ways to identify larger sets organizations contained in the new definition. This process is based on a set of variables, such as legal form, tax status, field of activity and presence in umbrella organizations’ registers. This way of working yields a high proportion of organizations that belong to the new definition of civil society, a number of organizations that need minor manual consideration, and a set of organizations that need to be checked thoroughly.

4.2 A Slightly Altered Classification System

For those of us who worked with the previous handbook, or with data compiled with the help of that handbook, it is worth mentioning that the classification system for organizations according to field of activity, ICNPO (the International Classification of Non-Profit Organizations), has also been updated and is in the new handbook called ICNP/TSO (International Classification of Nonprofit and Third Sector Organizations). Changes are mainly made to reflect changes in ISIC Rev 4. and to better incorporate those organizations that enter the sector due to the new limited profit distribution constraint. The changes from ICNPO to ICNP/TSO are not very dramatic, although some sub-groups were moved between the major categories. This means that a certain degree of translation will be needed when creating time-series of old and new data.

5.1 A Call to Decision Makers to Implement the Handbook

The new handbook provides us with a system for producing comparable statistics. The changes bring the spotlight back to civil society statistics. The UN Statistics Division and the connection to SNA provides further legitimacy for the system. To get a continuous time-series of reliable and comparable data, the responsibility lies with national statistical agencies. But, we should not believe that good data and relevant statistics will automatically arise, or that the statistics produced will be of sufficient quality just because we have a shiny new handbook.

In order to quickly get to the point where high quality statistics is continuously produced, we think it is important that national statistical agencies team up with existing civil society researchers to use their experience. Civil society organizations are complex with pitfalls for those without an extensive understanding of the sector and its organizations. Employees at statistical agencies are experts in the statistical craft while civil society researchers broadly comprehend how civil society is structured in a particular country. They know how to retrieve the necessary data and are well acquainted with the international scholarly society. Such a partnership between statisticians and scholars might yield time saved and a sense of higher legitimacy for the produced data among policymakers, researchers and civil society practitioners.

It is our firm belief that policymakers, researchers and leaders in civil society around the world will need to pressure their respective statistical agencies and their funders to incorporate civil society statistics in the official national statistics. It is important they also strive to safeguard that the quality of the produced and communicated statistics is scrutinized and ensured to be both high-quality and relevant. It is worth remembering that this is a completely new field for most statisticians working at national statistical agencies. Even with the new handbook, civil society is harder to represent than most other fields of statistics.

5.2 A Call for A Better and More In-Depth Comparative Civil Society Scholarship

The importance of comparable statistics – among years, sub-fields, and countries – cannot be underestimated. Policymakers, politicians and activists around the globe are now setting their hopes on a diverse population of civil society organizations that are expected to solve all kinds of both ‘wicked’ and normal problems. Matters ranging from traditional welfare services and democratic deficits, to global poverty reduction, transnational governance and the climate crisis are increasingly placed on the shoulders of these actors in our society. Policymakers need better knowledge and information upon which to base their decisions, ideologies and beliefs. Reliable, relevant and comparable statistics constitute one important component in this development. In parallel to such a development, however, civil society scholars and other social science researchers need to be freed from the tedious task of producing and making available basic statistics. Such a development would ensure that scholars can go deeper and beyond existing statistics to provide more comprehensive analyses of the data available – not the least as in the much-needed comparative studies. This will enable us to push forward the frontiers of civil society scholarship so that we might provide new possibilities for – and benefit from – the bright new researchers entering the field.