Geographic location, development of higher education and donations to Chinese non-public foundations

Abstract In recent years, Chinese non-public foundations have grown at an unprecedented rate, but research on charitable donations to these organizations is scarce. Building on nonprofit literature and borrowing from resource dependence, neo-institutionalism and interdependence theories, we seek to disentangle the distinctive donation pattern in Chinese non-public foundations by focusing on geographic location and higher education. To test the hypotheses, we performed Tobit and IV-Tobit regression analyses on data collected from 1,490 Chinese non-public foundations for 2013. We found that those foundations located near the center of provincial capitals received significantly more domestic donations. The development of higher education institutions located in the same area as the foundation also had a positive impact on donations. The findings of this research improve our understanding about the distinctive donation patterns during a period of fast economic transition and suggest useful ways for increasing the revenues of Chinese non-public foundations.