Charitable Activities and Community Well-Being - Economics Seminar

Event Date: 28 June 2023

Speaker: Professor Rose Anne Devlin, University of Ottowa

Time: 12-1:15pm

Location: Please contact Rachel Hill (r.hill@strath.ac.uk) for details. On campus: CW404b

Abstract: "Although charities are created for “…purposes that benefit the community”, it is remarkably difficult to assess their impact on community well-being. We tackle this challenge by focusing on charitable services provided to First Nations’ Reserves and Inuit Communities. Benefits are captured by their impact on a uniformly measured ‘community well-being’ (CWB) index; geo-coding technology enables the matching of the location of charities and communities. OLS estimations reveal robustly positive associations between the charitable sector and the CWB index and its constituent parts. Causal effects are identified using a Propensity Score Matching approach; the presence of at least one charity leads to about a 5-point or 7.5% increase in the CWB index.  To put this effect in context, over the 30-year period 1981 to 2011, First Nations’ communities experienced a total increase in the CWB of 12 points; it seems that the charitable sector matters"

Published: 1 June 2023