The U.S. is the No. 1 most generous country in the world for the last decade
By Fri, Oct 18, 2019
The United States has been the most generous country in the world over the past decade, but it could lose the top spot if giving trends continue to decline.
That’s the conclusion of the World Giving Index, a ranking that measured how likely residents of 128 countries were to practice acts of generosity.
The index, from the U.K.-based nonprofit Charities Aid Foundation, is based on Gallup’s World Poll surveys of 1.3 million people. Between 2009 and 2018, interviewers asked respondents whether they had done the following in the last month: helped a stranger or someone they didn’t know who needed help, donated money to charity, or volunteered their time to an organization.
At the top of the list were the U.S., Myanmar and New Zealand. The countries that scored the lowest were Yemen, Greece and China.
Americans say they want to give more money to charity
Two out of three Americans donated to charity within the last year, a recent nationally representative LendingTree survey of 1,079 Americans found. But financial constraints kept people from giving more money. Some 71% said their debt prevented them from donating as much as they’d like, and 56% said they didn’t make enough money to donate to charity. The average debt-carrying household in 2018 had roughly $144,100 in debt, LendingTree said.
Giving in the U.S. has declined
The U.S. peaked on the World Giving Index in 2014, but has declined since then. The report authors called this a “worrying trend” that’s also happening in other developed countries. While charities in the U.S. took in $427.71 billion in 2018 — an increase in total dollars from 2017 — giving by individual Americans dropped by 1.1%, the June 2019 Giving USA report found. (Giving USA is produced by The Giving Institute, an association of fundraising consultants and firms that service nonprofits, in collaboration with the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.)
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The World Giving Index report authors said they would be monitoring how the U.S.’s 2017 tax overhaul affects Americans’ donations to charities, because many have stopped claiming tax deductions for their charitable donations. A volatile stock market is also thought to be a factor dampening giving.
Both rich and poor countries are generous
“There is no one trait that points to a country’s generosity,” the World Giving Index authors said. The highest scoring countries “represent a wide range of geographies, religions, cultures and levels of wealth,” they noted.
While seven of the top 10 countries are among the wealthiest in the world, some are much less affluent: Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Indonesia are all classified by the United Nations as lower-middle-income countries, they said. Cultural factors appear to play a role. Both Myanmar and Sri Lanka have many practitioners of Theravada Buddhism, “for whom small, frequent acts of giving to those living a monastic lifestyle are the norm,” the authors noted.
Several African nations — including Liberia, Sierra Leone, Kenya and Zambia — topped the list of countries where people were most likely to help a stranger, which the authors said could be linked to the African philosophy of ubuntu, which promotes caring and community.
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