December 2, 1999 | Read Time: 1 minute
Philanthropy and the Law in Asia
Edited by Thomas Silk
This book sets out to gauge the current climate for philanthropy in nine Asian countries and Australia.
Recent legislation in Japan, the Philippines, and Thailand has enabled citizens to start non-profit organizations and to offer incentives to donors, writes the editor, but additional countries in the Pacific region must make changes before philanthropy will become viable there.
Mr. Silk is a lawyer in San Francisco and legal director of a project started in 1995 by the Asia Pacific Philanthropy Consortium, which recruited authors to examine the potential for non-profit activity in China, Indonesia, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam, and the countries mentioned above.
Each chapter examines legal procedures related to registering a non-profit organization, dissolving it, offering tax deductions, winning tax exemption, managing assets, and policing charities — or their East Asian equivalents.
In China, for example, anyone who wishes to start a non-profit group must align with a government sponsor and follow tight decrees on finances: Foundations cannot carry an endowment of more than $262,500. But when China decentralized many government functions in 1979, it sowed opportunities for establishing social-services organizations — along with the need to oversee such groups, write the lawyer Xin Chunying and the foundation officer Zhang Ye.
Other contributors include Satya Arinanto, a scholar who observes that Indonesia’s colonial past has made the country so reluctant to pass laws that non-profit organizations there operate without much-needed regulations; and Yoshinori Yamaoka, managing director of the Japan NPO Center, who writes that the suffering in Japan caused by a devastating earthquake in 1995 has led to legal changes intended to empower citizens’ groups.
Publisher: Jossey-Bass, 350 Sansome Street, San Francisco 94104-1310; (415) 433-1767; fax (800) 605-2665; World-Wide Web http://www.josseybass.com; 389 pages; $39.95; I.S.B.N. 0-7879-4510-2.
