In this month of January placed under the sign of the “cost of living” crisis, the queues of people registered for food aid from the Restos du Coeur are getting longer: 18% more applicants compared to the same month of 2022, after increases of 17% in December and 15% in November. To hold, the association created by Coluche stresses that it will rely essentially, as it has always done, on donations of money and food products, as well as on the time offered by its 70,000 volunteers.
If the reputation of theHomo economicuspresumed to be selfish and calculating, has long diverted economists from the study of charitable activities, the growing place of philanthropy in the financing of many sectors of activity raises questions about its impact, from the fight against poverty to the social action, from medical research to education, including culture and the environment…
Between 2010 and 2021, the amount of donations declared to the French tax authorities by individuals has doubled and that of companies by 2.3. An indication of this rise in power, some argue that French-style philanthropy is equivalent to the budgetary scope of a ministry. This was the case in 2021, where the total collection from individuals and businesses is estimated at around 9 billion euros, a figure higher than the endowment of the Ministry of Justice, of 8.2 billion euros the same year.
The France of volunteering
Françoise Benhamou, Emeritus Professor of Economics at the Sorbonne-Paris-Nord and President of the Circle of Economists, was “struck by the variety of forms that the gift can take” by writing last year with Nathalie Moureau, professor at Paul-Valéry Montpellier University, a book on The gift in the economy (The Discovery, 2022). “The donation today is both the luxury billionaires who mobilized in forty-eight hours after the Notre-Dame fire in April 2019, and a multitude of small sums that can change lives. » This ranges from cash rounding at the neighborhood supermarket to a coin given to a stranger on the street, to crowdfunding in the form of donations or collections by so-called “solidarity” search engines in exchange for your data. An inventory that suggests to these two authors that the gift economy is undervalued.
If we rely solely on data from the tax services, France does not appear to be particularly well placed in comparison with other countries, notes Arthur Gautier, the executive director of the philanthropy chair at the Ecole Supérieure des Sciences Economiques et commercial (Essec). In 2019, the cumulative tax-exempt donations from households and companies represented 0.31% of French GDP, compared to 0.8% in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Germany and up to 2.2% across the Atlantic. .
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