Philanthropy in the changing world: a changing attitude to giving?

Research Paper (postgraduate) from the year 2010 in the subject Economics - Other, Masyryk University (Centre for Nonprofit Sector Research), language: English, abstract: The topic of philanthropy has been receiving attention internationally for several decades. Like other areas of non-profit studies, charitable giving and volunteering are attracting more and more attention from researchers in a wide variety of disciplines, including economics. Even though philanthropy tends to be considered a sociological theme rather than an economic one, it poses a number of questions that challenge economists as well. Among others we chose the following: How can economists contribute to the theories related to philanthropy? Can we consider voluntary giving a demonstration of generosity rather than a market-based solution? Firstly, we intend to examine the terms that are used in the theory of public economics and to use them to examine the issues of philanthropy. They are as follows: the Samaritan¿s Dilemma; the Prisoner¿s Dilemma; or the Free-rider Problem, which we consider to be interesting and inspiring (Stone 2008). Next, we will try to answer the second question by means of sociological theory. The economists who investigate philanthropy are repeatedly faced with the obvious fact that it does not involve any buying and/or selling; it is not a marketplace operation. We have to look for, and identify, social values of donors and volunteers rather than economic values because the economists are not fully able to explain empathy, altruism and helpful behaviour using traditional economic principles (Rutherford 2008). The theoretical frame should be filled by relevant empirical data. There is, however, a lack of both theoretical and empirical work in this area in the Czech Republic. At the moment, we don¿t have relevant information about trends or people¿s motivations. We can only speculate people¿s behaviour from some ad hoc research or a one-off survey that was made eighteen years ago. For this reason, we intend to carry out a new representative survey in the Czech Republic. Before starting the large scale survey, we decided to do smaller pre-research probes into people¿s attitudes towards altruism, philanthropy and giving. A small questionnaire of fifteen questions testing people¿s attitudes towards giving was used in the survey, which was implemented in two waves with the help of students from the Department of Public Economics of Masaryk University.