Tag: America

America, New Zealand and Canada top list of world’s most generous nations

America has been named as the world’s most generous nation in the world, where its citizens give the most to charity, according to a new report.

The USA, New Zealand and Canada have the highest rate of charitable donations as a percentage gross domestic product (GDP), the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) found.

The UK had the fourth highest rate of charitable donations in a study of 24 nations and topped all other EU countries that were looked at.

CAF’s report took data from countries accounting for around 75 per cent of global GDP and 53 per cent of the world population.
Charitable giving by individuals as a percentage of GDP in America was recorded at 1.44%, in New Zealand at 0.79%, in Canada at .77% and in the UK – which came fourth globally – at 0.54%.

The report also analysed the impact of taxation and government spending and the amount given to charity and found there was “no significant correlation” except for employer social security charges, highlighting the complexity behind people’s decisions of when to give and how much.

Adam Pickering, international policy manager at CAF, said: “Across the 24 nations we studied, we found no significant link between government spending, income or corporation tax and the proportion of GDP donated by individuals.

“This suggests the relationship between the amount of taxes people pay and the amount they give to charity is not as clear cut as some may have thought.

“The factors which motivate people to give, and influence how much they give, are incredibly complex.”

Bill and Melinda Gates: More philanthropy can work against inequality

Since they launched their foundation in 2000, Bill and Melinda Gates have become America’s philanthropic golden couple — giving away more than $30 billion of their wealth and saving millions of lives in the process.

But their influence goes far beyond the work of their own foundation. The pair is credited with reinventing how philanthropy is done with their focus on concete measurable goals and consensus-building between foundations, businesses, development groups and governments.

In 2010, Bill Gates teamed up with his friend Warren Buffet to launch a campaign — called The Giving Pledge — to convince other super wealthy people around the world to give away at least 50 percent of their money to charity. There are now nearly 130 billionaires with a net worth of more than $700 billion who have signed the pledge.

This year, the Gateses are rallying other global citizens — ordinary people — to get involved in charity work.

“Having individuals stand up and say I care about the rest of the world, I care about these inequalities and I’m going to hold my government accountable for what they do — that’s what we’re hoping will happen,” Melinda Gates said in a joint interview with her husband earlier this year.

This interview, one in a series of conversations with tech figures who are shaking up philanthropy, has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: This year is your foundation’s 15th anniversary. When you reflect on all the work you’ve done, what are you most proud of?

Melinda: The work in vaccines and immunizations has really been transformative in bringing down childhood deaths. The two biggest killers of children are diarrhea and pneumonia. We now have new vaccines in those two areas that we’ve been involved in getting created, bringing the prices down and trying to get the lag time down. When we got into this work, the lag time in getting a vaccine from the United States to somewhere like Kenya was 20-25 years. That’s down now to one to three years. That’s something we’re in­cred­ibly proud of.