Non-profit Institutions’ Funding Resources in the Time of Crisis: Market or Government?

According to the theory, there are reasons to assume that non-profit institutions (NPI) behave specifically, in the way that is significantly different from the behaviour typical for both for-profit and public service providers. We focus on the research question whether NPIs, in tough times of economic crisis. And such specific “under pressure” behaviour represents the key topic of this paper. Paper investigates NPIs´ reactions to the distinctive changes of the economic environment in the 2008 – 2013 when Czech NPIs were relatively strongly affected by the crisis, although this affection probably haven’t been as heavy as in some other European countries. Non-profit institutions (NPI) are characterized by their multi-source funding when payments from end-consumers are relatively low. The most reliable data sources are Annual National Accounts and the Satellite Account of NPIs, presenting macroeconomic data. In this article we focus on structure of NPI funding resources changes in tough times of economic crisis. The paper derives from the preliminary results of our extensive research project focused on the impact of public financing on the structure of resources and production of non-profit institutions. This project utilizes a quantitative representative questionnaire survey of non-profit institutions. In this article we focus on a specific area of public social services only. The proposed paper seeks to prove that existing data sources do not capture the real/complex structure of NPI funding resources and will identify the shortcomings of the macroeconomic data and their scope.