CAF [Charities Aid Foundation - organização não governamental inglesa] has reviewed and compared the results of surveys of individual giving in a number of countries whose wealth covers over half of the total global economy.

These international comparisons of charitable giving reveal whether donating in the UK and other countries is as high as it could be, and what countries might learn from each other. Dissimilarities in survey methodologies and in definitions of voluntary organisations and of giving mean results need to be interpreted carefully. However the data has been standardised as far as possible to produce reasonably robust comparisons.

The results show:

• considerable international variation in charitable giving as a proportion (%) of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), with the amount individuals give to charity varying from 0.14% of GDP in France to 1.7% in the US, followed by the UK at 0.73%
• giving tends to represent a lower proportion of GDP in countries with higher levels of personal taxation, particularly social insurance; if social insurance payments were to rise in the future because of the needs of an ageing population, this could represent a threat to voluntary income
• some countries including the UK and the Netherlands could set themselves higher targets for individual charitable giving.

In Charities Aid Foundation , acedido a  2 de Julho de 2007