Based on a description of how non-profit institutions are defined in the System of National Accounts, this paper examines the actual treatment of non-profit institutions in several countries, and comes up with an overall assessment in terms of coverage and data quality. Finding both data coverage and quality poor across countries, we make two recommendations aimed at improving the presentation and understanding of non-profit institutions within the SNA. First, we suggest the introduction of a system by which non-profit institutions can be identified within the system of national accounts even if they are allocated to other sectors of the economy. Second, we recommend a wider use of satellite accounts in industries where non-profit institutions are prominent.

The three major sources of financial support for non-profit institutions are user fees, government transfers and private contributions. Chapter 2 of the Nonprofit Almanac focuses on the last of these, which is taken to include charitable donations of money and assets (from individuals, corporations and estates), volunteer work and foundation grants. These forms of support, according to the chapter's introduction, ‘provide a barometer of public support for the activities of this sector and its continued vitality’ (p.41). I begin with a brief review of the chapter and the information presented in it, noting some of its highlights. I then offer several comments and suggestions regarding the presentation.

Until pioneering research on non-profit employment was performed under the auspices of the Filer Commission in the mid-1970s and shortly thereafter at Yale, there had been little public recognition of the non-profit sector's use of human resources.

Victor Fuchs and others had earlier brought to public attention the rapid growth of the service economy in the United States, but it was the Filer and Yale work that revealed the importance of the non-profit segment of the service economy by demonstrating that the growth of the non-profit labour force during the 1970s had substantially outstripped the growth of the for-profit labour force in the service economy.

The benefits of providing a separate accounting for non-profit organisations in the financial accounts of the United States are discussed. At present, national economic accounts in the US include non-profit organisations with individuals in the household sector; separate information on the financial activity of non-profit institutions until now has not been available. In this paper, aggregate statistics from federal government tax-exempt filings for non-profit institutions are put into a US flow-of-funds framework. The data for the 1982-1988 period indicate that non-profit institutions accounted for a significant and growing proportion of assets of the household sector in the United States. Their liabilities were also a surprisingly large share of the household sector total. Moreover, funds supplied by the non-profit sector for investment were in some years comparable to funds made available by several important groups of non-depository financial intermediaries. Separate accounting for non-profit organisations within national economic accounts would be likely to reveal an important channel for investment financing in the United States and would significantly improve our ability to measure and analyse the financial activity of individuals by allowing for a ‘purer’ household sector.

Chapter 4 of the Nonprofit Almanac concerns financial trends in private foundations and other non-profit organisations, reporting the sources and disposition of annual funds and several measures of organisational wealth. Like the rest of the volume, this chapter reports only financial measures of input and output use. This is regrettable, for the distinctive outputs of the sector are often undervalued at market prices (due to external benefits), and financial aggregates shed no light on the sector's impact on the distribution of income.

The input-output model currently used for estimating the size, scope and dimensions of the non-profit sector in the US economy is based on the SIC system. Unfortunately, this system is inadequate to provide detailed information on the non-profit sector. In response, we developed a classification system - the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities (NTEE) - to define and measure the sector more accurately. This article describes the relationship between the SIC-based measures and the NTEE based measures, and reports on current efforts to link the NTEE system with tax data bases maintained at the Internal Revenue Service.

Would our knowledge of the independent sector be enriched by a selective taxonomy of US non-profit organisations and presentation of financial and other data for important sub-groups in the sector? A useful taxonomy should provide meaningful, significant and relatively homogeneous categories of a population that aid in analysis and interpretation. This review of the Nonprofit Almanac assesses the contribution that the information, discussion and tables in Chapter 5 make to our understanding of the non-profit sector. The initial discussion of the classification of non-profits by functional purpose, size and region is followed by a review of basic data limitations, chapter findings and their significance.

As a result in part of the way non-profit institutions are defined and treated in the United Nations System of National Accounts (SNA), little is known about the size, scope, financial base and role of this set of institutions at the international level, even though their importance is increasingly being recognised throughout the world. To remedy this significant lack of systematic information on non-profit institutions cross-nationally, the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project has undertaken a major analysis of the economic role of this sector in twelve countries throughout the world, utilising a more meaningful definition of the sector and an approach that is otherwise consistent with the overall thrust of the SNA system. This paper outlines the basis of the more inclusive definition of the non-profit sector embodied in this project, the classification system formulated to structure data-gathering on this more broadly-defined sector and the data assembly strategy developed to build up key estimates of the scale, structure and revenue sources of the non-profit sector in the project countries. The article concludes with a recommendation to incorporate a similar approach to the assembly of data on the non-profit sector into the ongoing SNA system on a regular basis.

Tax-exempt, non-profit organisations represent a significant and growing sector within the US economy. Between 1975 and 1990, assets of tax-exempt organisations increased in real terms by over 150 per cent while the revenue increased by over 227 per cent. This compares to a growth in real GDP of 52 per cent over the same period. A variety of tax policy issues on tax-exempt organisations and the non-profit sector can be addressed using several sources of data collected by the IRS from federal information and tax returns of exempt organisations. The Statistics of Income (SOI) Division, using sample data, conducts studies of many of the different components of the tax-exempt sector, including non-profit charitable organisations, organisations exempt under sections 501(c)(4)-(c)(9), private foundations and 4947(a) charitable trusts, and the unrelated business income of tax-exempt organisations. Income statement, balance sheet and other financial data, as well as a great amount of non-financial information, are collected in these SOI studies. The primary purposes of this article are: first, to document the role of the non-profit sector in the US economy and the evolving growth and change within the sector from the mid-1970s through to the present; and, second, to describe the ongoing SOI studies of tax-exempt organisations, the products and services available through SOI, and the future statistical plans at SOI for data collection and analysis of tax-exempt organisations and the non-profit sector.

The Nonprofit Almanac, published by Independent Sector (IS), updates and extends the useful compilations of data - much of which were collected in IS-sponsored surveys - that have been published under the title, Dimensions of the Independent Sector. More importantly, it is the first grand application of the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities (NTEE), a framework for describing charitable organisations and purposes that has been developed by the National Center for Charitable Statistics at IS, and the first major statistical use of the information that non-profits file with the Internal Revenue Service. Does this new data source improve the quality of available information about American non-profits? An examination of the health care section of the Almanac suggests that, at best, the answer is ‘not yet’.