Torbjörn Einarsson

Published in August 2018 by the United Nations Statistics Division, the new handbook Satellite Account on Nonprofit and Related Institutions and Volunteer Work calls on national statistical agencies to produce statistics for civil society. The handbook provides guidelines for producing statistics as part of the agencies’ regular official economic data-gathering and reporting. The handbook also provides guidelines for the development of a satellite account that presents data on nonprofit organizations within the framework of the System of National Accounts (SNA). The handbook is an update of a previous handbook so we will start our review from the original handbook.

During the last couple of decades interest in the role of nonprofit and civil society organizations and their role in society has grown increasingly stronger in different parts of the world. Lester Salamon, one of the architects behind the statistics gathering initiative, has labeled this “a global associational revolution” (Salamon 1994). Policy makers, researchers and civil society leaders alike had a similar need for current knowledge with a pronounced need for internationally comparable data.
Despite the new and developing interest, civil society organizations have remained poorly understood. Even basic knowledge of the size and structure of civil society has been lacking. One underlying reason for this lacuna was the fact that the SNA did not report separately on nonprofit or civil society organizations (CSOs). Rather, most data on these organizations are merged with data on others sectors in the SNA. This practice made civil society practically invisible in official national economic statistics.