| In recent years, charitable organizations play an increasingly important role in social life and economic development; both practitioners and academics are beginning to pay attention to the development and research on charities. Although the concept of charity appeared much later than government, partnership and corporations, the organized, non-governmental, non-profit-distributing, self-governing and voluntary features of charitable organization have determined its position to make up the gap between "market failure" and "government failure". With the accumulation of social wealth after decades of reform and opening up and the gradually awakening of the "citizenship" concept, China’s philanthropy industry is developing in a fast pace. The total social contributions in 2013 amounted to 98.9 billion yuan.Public Foundations achieved special attention and served an important role in the development of philanthropy. The group has created the Hope Project, Mother Reservoir, Spring Bud Program and other famous brands, spread the philanthropic culture, and propagandized spirit of volunteerism.The guarantee of the sustainable development of public foundations lies in stable donation income. Different public foundations received significantly different amounts of annual donations. For example China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation and the China Youth Development Foundation received more than 200 million yuan donations in recent three years, respectively. Specifically in 2013 both foundations’ donation income was more than 500 million yuan. While at the same time, the donation income of China Reform Foundation was less than 200 million yuan in recent 3 years. What’s more, it only received 2,000 yuan donations in 2012.Based on the above facts, the question to be answered is whether public foundations’ characteristics will affect its donations, and if so, what are the characteristics, which characteristics donors are particularly concerned about.This paper selects 1,298 public foundations whose data in 2010-2012 are collected by Foundation Center website as research objects and examines the impact on public foundations’ donations from 3 perspectives. They are information transparency, operational efficiency and financial flexibility. The article first reviews the relevant foreign and domestic literatures on non-profit organizations’ governance, information disclosure, and factors affecting donations income; secondly, the article determines the following proxy variables: the foundation transparency index co-developed by Foundation Center and Tsinghua University as a proxy for information transparency, program cost divided by total cost and the sum of fundraising expense and administrative expense divided by total income as proxies for operational efficiency variable, non-restrictive net assets divided by total net assets as a proxy for financial flexibility variable. Finally, after controlling for the organizational size, government grant income, investment income, business activities scope, operational activities field and age, a multiple linear regression model is constructed to determine the extent of the above factors affecting the total donation, individual donation and organizational donation.The results show that:(1) the total donation of public foundations has a significantly positive correlation with information transparency and operational efficiency, and a significantly negative correlation with financial flexibility; (2) individual donation is significantly correlated with information transparency, operational efficiency, but not with financial flexibility; (3) organizational donation is significantly positive correlated with information transparency and operational efficiency and significantly negative correlated with financial flexibility. In addition, the article also found government grant income and investment income crowds out donation, age presented a significantly negative correlation with donation income, organization size presented a significantly positive correlation with donation and a national wide public foundation which focused on education is more inclined to receive donations.In summary, through normative analysis and empirical research, this paper found that information transparency and operational efficiency are 2 key factors affecting public foundations’ donation income. In the end, the article suggests that public foundation, government and the third-party professional institution should work together to improve transparency and efficiency of public foundations, thus to improve public foundation’s fund-raising and fund management capacity. |
