Edith Archambault

Historical Roots of the Nonprofit Sector in France

Though deeply rooted in the Middle Ages, as in every European Country, the French nonprofit sector differs in that it was secularized and restricted at the beginning of the 19th century by the centralized state. According to a tradition dating back to the 1789 Revolution, the state had the monopoly of public interest concerns. This tradition gradually lost force in the 20th century, and nonprofit organizations multiplied during the past three decades in every field of public interest. This trend was encouraged by the central and local governments in a period of decentralization and European integration. Decentralization offers a great opportunity for the French nonprofit sector; conversely, nonprofit organizations provide collective services in an alternative way and can offer an antidote to latent centralization tendencies.

Dilemmas of Public/Private Partnership in France

The field of social services is characterized in France by a mixed structure, which has favoured the enormous growth in this field of the third sector. The Johns Hopkins Project has shown that ‘social services’, that is facilities for specific groups of people such as families, handicapped, elderly, young people and adults in social difficulty, income support and maintenance, emergency and relief, and charities, is by far the major area of non-profit involvement, in spite of the sustained expansion of governmental provision in this field.1 This field accounted for 29 per cent of the third sector’s operating expenditures in 1990 and 38.5 per cent of total third sector employment, employing about 300,000 wage earners. Apart from being the largest field of non-profit labour, non-profit employment in this field dominates employment in the area of social services (58 per cent of total employment) and has almost doubled since 1980, contrasting with a significant decrease in general employment.

Social Invesment: Franco-German Experiences

With the global financial and economic crisis as a backdrop, we argue that social investment presents an innovative option with considerable potential. Social investment, defined as private contributions to public benefit, breaks conventional boundaries that limit private investment to businesses and public investment to government. Rather social investments turn out to be a third option for policy makers, as they combine the economic and the social, the private and the public. Introducing the key models and tools, the chapter offers examples ot social investments in France and Germany. In conclusion, it regrets the lack of an enabling framework and makes plea for a European social investment market.

The Third Sector in France and the Labour Market Policy

In France, like in other Western European countries, the third sector has been on a steady increase during the last decade as the results of the Johns Hopkins comparative project shows it. Today nonprofit organisations play also an increasing role in labour market policies. In a country with a corporatist welfare state, the access to the labour-market represents the key for social rights.

European System of Accounts: The French Case

The 1995 European System of Accounts (1995 ESA), an adapted version of the United Nations System of National Accounts (1993 SNA), will be applied in most European countries. This research note shows that the empirical knowledge of the nonprofit sector is not improved in this change. We first review the treatment of the nonprofit organizations in 1968 SNA, and then discuss the 1993 SNA and 1995 ESA approaches, which do not clear up many conceptual difficulties. The classification of the private nonprofit institutions serving households by the French statistical office is also presented and criticized. A way forward through the use of a satellite account system is proposed.