General data about Italian No Profit institutions

Some information will be given with reference to social economy ( no profit) refers to the 8° General census of Industry and Services – ISTAT data( National Institute of Statistics) 2001.

The eighth industry and services census gave full visibility to the so-called third sector, that is a complex and heterogeneous universe of the private institution and no profit enterprise: the concept of “private institution and no profit enterprise” adopted by this census is based on the criteria of “ no profit distribution”, which goes along with the definition adopted by the United States, Eurostat and from the main international statistic organisms.

The operative no profit institution are 235.232, articulated in 253.344 local units. 488 thousands workers are employed by them, plus 100.500 workers with temporary contracts plus 3million 300 thousand volunteers.

The no-profit institution are mainly represented by not recognized institution(156 thousand) and recognized associations ( 62 thousand). Relevant is also the number of social cooperative ( 5.700) and foundation (3.100) that have a meaningful role in the activities to execute, the quota of employed employees and the economic consistency of their initiatives. The social cooperative employ 149thousands employees ( with an average of 26.3 employees each one), while in the foundation are employed 41 thousands employees ( with an average 13.2 employees per foundation).

73.2% of the no profit institution’s local units perform in cultural, sportive and recreational sector (185thousands units) where are employed 14% of the total employed. The second sector is about sanity and social assistance where perform the 12.6% of the local units (32thousands) and are employed more than half of the total employees (261 thousands equal to 53.3%). Follow the sector of the politics activities, trade-union relations and interest representation (20 thousand units equal to 8%) and the education sector, where in 11thousand local unit (4.4% of the total) are employed 100 thousand employees (20.5%).

The third sector total earnings, at the time of national statistical Institute 2001 census, was equal to around 38 billion Euro, the expenses were instead equal to about 35 billion Euro, an amount equal to 3.2% of the gross domestic product . Every year this sector was making more than 2billion Euro to reinvest in the activities performed by the organizations.

• 
  economic development and social cohesion (3.9%)
  
• 
  promotion and religious education (3.3%)
  
• 
  rights tutelage and politics activities (2.7%)
  
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  philanthropy and voluntarism promotion ( 2.1%)
  
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  cooperation and international solidarity (1.2%)
  
• 
  environment (0.5%)
  

Some no profit enterprises have a hierarchical structure with many employees, on the contrary, some others have a large number of volunteers ( this means that participants follow one another).

Therefore, it’s still very difficult to define a general theory on no profit enterprises.

The attempt, hereafter presented, is to identify enterprises according to their business economics profile and to apply results to the Italian no profit “world”.

The following classification was based on “heterogeneous group” rather than juridical case.

Obviously in this groups are presents various exceptions, but what we need to underline it’s that the extreme diversification inside the third sector doesn’t preclude useful and reasonable classifications.

Following an entrepreneurial criteria we will present an attempt of classification based on the dynamics that constitute the minimum economical balance, which means that the enterprise must to be able to make enough profit to cover the whole management process or even better make a higher profit.

In order to create an homogeneous group out of the heterogeneous no profit world it is necessary to understand how the single features get their productive factors and how they get paid for the allocation of their services.

This subdivision allows to make homogeneous groups of no profit entities that although belonging to the same sector have different needs of statement account.

This classification can be used to identify classes of no profit enterprises and assign to each of them model of representing and model of socio-ethical statement account.

Five different classes came out from this classification.